About the electronic version
The Souls of Black Folk
Du Bois, W. E. Burghardt
Creation of machine-readable version: Judy Boss
Creation of digital images: Matthew G. Kirschenbaum
Conversion to TEI.2-conformant markup: University of Virginia LibraryElectronic Text Center. ca. 435 kilobytes
This version available from the University of Virginia Library.
Charlottesville, Va.
http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/modeng/modeng0.browse.html
Copyright 1999, by the Rector and Visitors of theUniversity of Virginia
Commercial use prohibited; all usage governed by ourConditions of Use:http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/conditions.html
1996
Note: Images of the musical notations have been included from the 1903 A.C.McClurg edition of Souls of Black Folk (Chicago).
About the print version
The Souls of Black Folk: Essays and Sketches
W. E. Burghardt Du Bois
Bantam Classic
Bantam Classic text reprinted from the 1953 Blue Heron edition.
New York
1989
Prepared for the University of Virginia Library ElectronicText Center.
Note [from Judy Boss]: On page 83, paragraph 1, line 2, Ihave added an apostrophe to the word Shepherds.
Musical notation at the start of each chapter has beenidentified according to Eric Sundquist's To Wake the Nations: Race in theMaking of American Literature. Cambridge, MA.: Harvard UP, 1993. p. 492.
Spell-check and verification made against printed textusing UNIX-spell spell checker.
Published: 1903
English non-fiction; prose Native AmericanAfrican AmericanAmerican Civil WarLCSH 24-bit color; 400 dpi
Revisions to the electronic version
September 1996 corrector Matthew G. Kirschenbaum, University of VirginiaLibrary Electronic Text Center
To Burghardt and Yolande The Lost and the Found
Page xxxi
Herein lie buried many things which if read with patiencemay show the strange meaning of being black here at the dawning of theTwentieth Century. This meaning is not without interest to you, Gentle Reader;for the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color line. Ipray you, then, receive my little book in all charity, studying my words withme, forgiving mistake and foible for sake of the faith and passion that is inme, and seeking the grain of truth hidden there.
I have sought here to sketch, in vague, uncertainoutline, the spiritual world in which ten thousand thousand Americans live andstrive. First, in two chapters I have tried to show what Emancipation meant tothem, and what was its aftermath. In a third chapter I have pointed out theslow rise of personal leadership, and criticized candidly the leader who bearsthe chief burden of his race to-day. Then, in two other chapters I havesketched in swift outline the two worlds within and without the Veil, and thushave come to the central problem of training men for life. Venturing now intodeeper detail, I have in two chapters studied the struggles of the massedmillions of the black peasantry, and in another have sought to make clear thepresent relations of the sons of master and man. Leaving, then, the whiteworld, I have stepped within the Veil, raising it that you may view faintly itsdeeper recesses, -- the meaning of its religion, the passion of its humansorrow, and the struggle of its greater souls. All this I have ended with atale twice told but seldom written, and a chapter of song.
Some of these thoughts of mine have seen the light beforein other guise. For kindly consenting to their republication
Page xxxii
here, in altered and extended form, I must thank the publishers of theAtlantic Monthly, The World's Work, The Dial, The NewWorld, and the Annals of the American Academy of Political and SocialScience. Before each chapter, as now printed, stands a bar of the SorrowSongs, -- some echo of haunting melody from the only American music whichwelled up from black souls in the dark past. And, finally, need I add that Iwho speak here am bone of the bone and flesh of the flesh of them that livewithin the Veil?
W.E.B Du B.
ATLANTA, GA., FEB. 1, 1903.
Page 1
O water, voice of my heart, crying in the sand,
All night long crying with a mournful cry,
As I lie and listen, and cannot understand
The voice of my heart in my side or the voice of the sea,
O water, crying for rest, is it I, is it I?
All night long the water is crying to me.
Unresting water, there shall never be rest
Till the last moon droop and the last tide fail,
And the fire of the end begin to burn in the west;
And the heart shall be weary and wonder and cry like the sea,
All life long crying without avail,
As the water all night long is crying to me.
ARTHUR SYMONS.
Between me and the other world there is ever an unaskedquestion: unasked by some through feelings of delicacy; by others through thedifficulty of rightly framing it. All, nevertheless, flutter round it. Theyapproach me in a half- hesitant sort of way, eye me curiously orcompassionately, and then, instead of saying directly, How does it feel to be aproblem? they say, I know an excellent colored man in my town; or, I fought atMechanicsville; or, Do not these Southern outrages make your blood boil? Atthese I smile, or am interested, or reduce the boiling to a simmer, as theoccasion
Page 2
may require. To the real question, How does it feel to be a problem? I answerseldom a word.
And yet, being a problem is a strange experience, --peculiar even for one who has never been anything else, save perhaps inbabyhood and in Europe. It is in the early days of rollicking boyhood that therevelation first bursts upon one, all in a day, as it were. I remember wellwhen the shadow swept across me. I was a little thing, away up in the hills ofNew England, where the dark Housatonic winds between Hoosac and Taghkanic tothe sea. In a wee wooden schoolhouse, something put it into the boys' andgirls' heads to buy gorgeous visiting- cards -- ten cents a package -- andexchange. The exchange was merry, till one girl, a tall newcomer, refused mycard, -- refused it peremptorily, with a glance. Then it dawned upon me with acertain suddenness that I was different from the others; or like, mayhap, inheart and life and longing, but shut out from their world by a vast veil. I hadthereafter no desire to tear down that veil, to creep through; I held allbeyond it in common contempt, and lived above it in a region of blue sky andgreat wandering shadows. That sky was bluest when I could beat my mates atexamination-time, or beat them at a foot-race, or even beat their stringyheads. Alas, with the years all this fine contempt began to fade; for the wordsI longed for, and all their dazzling opportunities, were theirs, not mine. Butthey should not keep these prizes, I said; some, all, I would wrest from them.Just how I would do it I could never decide: by reading law, by healing thesick, by telling the wonderful tales that swam in my head, -- some way. Withother black boys the strife was not so fiercely sunny: their youth shrunk intotasteless sycophancy, or into silent hatred of the pale world about them andmocking distrust of everything white; or wasted itself in a bitter cry, Why didGod make me an outcast and a stranger in mine own house? The shades of theprison-house closed round about us all: walls strait and stubborn to thewhitest, but relentlessly narrow, tall, and unscalable to sons of night whomust plod darkly on in resignation, or beat unavailing palms against the stone,or steadily, half hopelessly, watch the streak of blue above.
After the Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and Roman, the
Page 3
Teuton and Mongolian, the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, andgifted with second-sight in this American world, -- a world which yields him notrue self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelationof the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, thissense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others, of measuringone's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.One ever feels his twoness, -- an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts,two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose doggedstrength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.
The history of the American Negro is the history of thisstrife, -- this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his doubleself into a better and truer self. In this merging he wishes neither of theolder selves to be lost. He would not Africanize America, for America has toomuch to teach the world and Africa. He would not bleach his Negro soul in aflood of white Americanism, for he knows that Negro blood has a message for theworld. He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and anAmerican, without being cursed and spit upon by his fellows, without having thedoors of Opportunity closed roughly in his face.
This, then, is the end of his striving: to be a co-workerin the kingdom of culture, to escape both death and isolation, to husband anduse his best powers and his latent genius. These powers of body and mind havein the past been strangely wasted, dispersed, or forgotten. The shadow of amighty Negro past flits through the tale of Ethiopia the Shadowy and of Egyptthe Sphinx. Through history, the powers of single black men flash here andthere like falling stars, and die sometimes before the world has rightly gaugedtheir brightness. Here in America, in the few days since Emancipation, theblack man's turning hither and thither in hesitant and doubtful striving hasoften made his very strength to lose effectiveness, to seem like absence ofpower, like weakness. And yet it is not weakness, -- it is the contradiction ofdouble aims. The double-aimed struggle of the black artisan -- on the one handto escape white contempt for a nation of mere hewers of wood and drawers ofwater, and on the other hand
Page 4
to plough and nail and dig for a poverty-stricken horde -- could only result inmaking him a poor craftsman, for he had but half a heart in either cause. Bythe poverty and ignorance of his people, the Negro minister or doctor wastempted toward quackery and demagogy; and by the criticism of the other world,toward ideals that made him ashamed of his lowly tasks. The would-be blacksavant was confronted by the paradox that the knowledge his peopleneeded was a twice- told tale to his white neighbors, while the knowledge whichwould teach the white world was Greek to his own flesh and blood. The innatelove of harmony and beauty that set the ruder souls of his people a-dancing anda-singing raised but confusion and doubt in the soul of the black artist; forthe beauty revealed to him was the soul-beauty of a race which his largeraudience despised, and he could not articulate the message of another people.This waste of double aims, this seeking to satisfy two unreconciled ideals, haswrought sad havoc with the courage and faith and deeds of ten thousand thousandpeople, -- has sent them often wooing false gods and invoking false means ofsalvation, and at times has even seemed about to make them ashamed ofthemselves.
Away back in the days of bondage they thought to see inone divine event the end of all doubt and disappointment; few men everworshipped Freedom with half such unquestioning faith as did the American Negrofor two centuries. To him, so far as he thought and dreamed, slavery was indeedthe sum of all villainies, the cause of all sorrow, the root of all prejudice;Emancipation was the key to a promised land of sweeter beauty than everstretched before the eyes of wearied Israelites. In song and exhortationswelled one refrain -- Liberty; in his tears and curses the God he implored hadFreedom in his right hand. At last it came, -- suddenly, fearfully, like adream. With one wild carnival of blood and passion came the message in his ownplaintive cadences: --
"Shout, O children!
Shout, you're free!
For God has bought your liberty!"
Years have passed away since then, -- ten, twenty, forty;
Page 5
forty years of national life, forty years of renewal and development, and yetthe swarthy spectre sits in its accustomed seat at the Nation's feast. In vaindo we cry to this our vastest social problem: --
"Take any shape but that, and my firm nerves
Shall never tremble!"
The Nation has not yet found peace from its sins; thefreedman has not yet found in freedom his promised land. Whatever of good mayhave come in these years of change, the shadow of a deep disappointment restsupon the Negro people, -- a disappointment all the more bitter because theunattained ideal was unbounded save by the simple ignorance of a lowly people.
The first decade was merely a prolongation of the vainsearch for freedom, the boon that seemed ever barely to elude their grasp, --like a tantalizing will-o'-the-wisp, maddening and misleading the headlesshost. The holocaust of war, the terrors of the Ku-Klux Klan, the lies ofcarpet-baggers, the disorganization of industry, and the contradictory adviceof friends and foes, left the bewildered serf with no new watchword beyond theold cry for freedom. As the time flew, however, he began to grasp a new idea.The ideal of liberty demanded for its attainment powerful means, and these theFifteenth Amendment gave him. The ballot, which before he had looked upon as avisible sign of freedom, he now regarded as the chief means of gaining andperfecting the liberty with which war had partially endowed him. And why not?Had not votes made war and emancipated millions? Had not votes enfranchised thefreedmen? Was anything impossible to a power that had done all this? A millionblack men started with renewed zeal to vote themselves into the kingdom. So thedecade flew away, the revolution of 1876 came, and left the half-free serfweary, wondering, but still inspired. Slowly but steadily, in the followingyears, a new vision began gradually to replace the dream of political power, --a powerful movement, the rise of another ideal to guide the unguided, anotherpillar of fire by night after a clouded day. It was the ideal of"book-learning"; the curiosity, born of compulsory ignorance, to knowand test the power of the cabalistic letters
Page 6
of the white man, the longing to know. Here at last seemed to have beendiscovered the mountain path to Canaan; longer than the highway of Emancipationand law, steep and rugged, but straight, leading to heights high enough tooverlook life.
Up the new path the advance guard toiled, slowly,heavily, doggedly; only those who have watched and guided the faltering feet,the misty minds, the dull understandings, of the dark pupils of these schoolsknow how faithfully, how piteously, this people strove to learn. It was wearywork. The cold statistician wrote down the inches of progress here and there,noted also where here and there a foot had slipped or some one had fallen. Tothe tired climbers, the horizon was ever dark, the mists were often cold, theCanaan was always dim and far away. If, however, the vistas disclosed as yet nogoal, no resting-place, little but flattery and criticism, the journey at leastgave leisure for reflection and self-examination; it changed the child ofEmancipation to the youth with dawning self-consciousness, self-realization,self-respect. In those sombre forests of his striving his own soul rose beforehim, and he saw himself, -- darkly as through a veil; and yet he saw in himselfsome faint revelation of his power, of his mission. He began to have a dimfeeling that, to attain his place in the world, he must be himself, and notanother. For the first time he sought to analyze the burden he bore upon hisback, that dead-weight of social degradation partially masked behind ahalf-named Negro problem. He felt his poverty; without a cent, without a home,without land, tools, or savings, he had entered into competition with rich,landed, skilled neighbors. To be a poor man is hard, but to be a poor race in aland of dollars is the very bottom of hardships. He felt the weight of hisignorance, -- not simply of letters, but of life, of business, of thehumanities; the accumulated sloth and shirking and awkwardness of decades andcenturies shackled his hands and feet. Nor was his burden all poverty andignorance. The red stain of bastardy, which two centuries of systematic legaldefilement of Negro women had stamped upon his race, meant not only the loss ofancient African chastity, but also the hereditary weight of a mass ofcorruption from white adulterers, threatening almost the obliteration of theNegro home.
Page 7
A people thus handicapped ought not to be asked to racewith the world, but rather allowed to give all its time and thought to its ownsocial problems. But alas! while sociologists gleefully count his bastards andhis prostitutes, the very soul of the toiling, sweating black man is darkenedby the shadow of a vast despair. Men call the shadow prejudice, and learnedlyexplain it as the natural defence of culture against barbarism, learningagainst ignorance, purity against crime, the "higher" against the"lower" races. To which the Negro cries Amen! and swears that to somuch of this strange prejudice as is founded on just homage to civilization,culture, righteousness, and progress, he humbly bows and meekly does obeisance.But before that nameless prejudice that leaps beyond all this he standshelpless, dismayed, and well-nigh speechless; before that personal disrespectand mockery, the ridicule and systematic humiliation, the distortion of factand wanton license of fancy, the cynical ignoring of the better and theboisterous welcoming of the worse, the all-pervading desire to inculcatedisdain for everything black, from Toussaint to the devil, -- before this thererises a sickening despair that would disarm and discourage any nation save thatblack host to whom "discouragement" is an unwritten word.
But the facing of so vast a prejudice could not but bringthe inevitable self-questioning, self-disparagement, and lowering of idealswhich ever accompany repression and breed in an atmosphere of contempt andhate. Whisperings and portents came home upon the four winds: Lo! we arediseased and dying, cried the dark hosts; we cannot write, our voting is vain;what need of education, since we must always cook and serve? And the Nationechoed and enforced this self-criticism, saying: Be content to be servants, andnothing more; what need of higher culture for half-men? Away with the blackman's ballot, by force or fraud, -- and behold the suicide of a race!Nevertheless, out of the evil came something of good, -- the more carefuladjustment of education to real life, the clearer perception of the Negroes'social responsibilities, and the sobering realization of the meaning ofprogress.
So dawned the time of Sturm und Drang: storm andstress to-day rocks our little boat on the mad waters of the world- sea; thereis within and without the sound of conflict, the
Page 8
burning of body and rending of soul; inspiration strives with doubt, and faithwith vain questionings. The bright ideals of the past, -- physical freedom,political power, the training of brains and the training of hands, -- all thesein turn have waxed and waned, until even the last grows dim and overcast. Arethey all wrong, -- all false? No, not that, but each alone was over-simple andincomplete, -- the dreams of a credulous race-childhood, or the fond imaginingsof the other world which does not know and does not want to know our power. Tobe really true, all these ideals must be melted and welded into one. Thetraining of the schools we need to-day more than ever, -- the training of defthands, quick eyes and ears, and above all the broader, deeper, higher cultureof gifted minds and pure hearts. The power of the ballot we need in sheerself-defence, -- else what shall save us from a second slavery? Freedom, too,the long-sought, we still seek, -- the freedom of life and limb, the freedom towork and think, the freedom to love and aspire. Work, culture, liberty, -- allthese we need, not singly but together, not successively but together, eachgrowing and aiding each, and all striving toward that vaster ideal that swimsbefore the Negro people, the ideal of human brotherhood, gained through theunifying ideal of Race; the ideal of fostering and developing the traits andtalents of the Negro, not in opposition to or contempt for other races, butrather in large conformity to the greater ideals of the American Republic, inorder that some day on American soil two world-races may give each to eachthose characteristics both so sadly lack. We the darker ones come even now notaltogether empty-handed: there are to-day no truer exponents of the pure humanspirit of the Declaration of Independence than the American Negroes; there isno true American music but the wild sweet melodies of the Negro slave; theAmerican fairy tales and folklore are Indian and African; and, all in all, weblack men seem the sole oasis of simple faith and reverence in a dusty desertof dollars and smartness. Will America be poorer if she replace her brutaldyspeptic blundering with light-hearted but determined Negro humility? or hercoarse and cruel wit with loving jovial good-humor? or her vulgar music withthe soul of the Sorrow Songs?
Merely a concrete test of the underlying principles ofthe
Page 9
great republic is the Negro Problem, and the spiritual striving of thefreedmen's sons is the travail of souls whose burden is almost beyond themeasure of their strength, but who bear it in the name of an historic race, inthe name of this the land of their fathers' fathers, and in the name of humanopportunity.
And now what I have briefly sketched in large outline letme on coming pages tell again in many ways, with loving emphasis and deeperdetail, that men may listen to the striving in the souls of black folk.
Page 10
Careless seems the great Avenger;
History's lessons but record
One death-grapple in the darkness
'Twixt old systems and the Word;
Truth forever on the scaffold,
Wrong forever on the throne;
Yet that scaffold sways the future,
And behind the dim unknown
Standeth God within the shadow
Keeping watch above His own.
LOWELL.
The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of thecolor-line, -- the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asiaand Africa, in America and the islands of the sea. It was a phase of thisproblem that caused the Civil War; and however much they who marched South andNorth in 1861 may have fixed on the technical points, of union and localautonomy as a shibboleth, all nevertheless knew, as we know, that the questionof Negro slavery was the real cause of the conflict. Curious it was, too, howthis deeper question
Page 11
ever forced itself to the surface despite effort and disclaimer. No sooner hadNorthern armies touched Southern soil than this old question, newly guised,sprang from the earth, -- What shall be done with Negroes? Peremptory militarycommands this way and that, could not answer the query; the EmancipationProclamation seemed but to broaden and intensify the difficulties; and the WarAmendments made the Negro problems of to-day.
It is the aim of this essay to study the period ofhistory from 1861 to 1872 so far as it relates to the American Negro. Ineffect, this tale of the dawn of Freedom is an account of that government ofmen called the Freedmen's Bureau, -- one of the most singular and interestingof the attempts made by a great nation to grapple with vast problems of raceand social condition.
The war has naught to do with slaves, cried Congress, thePresident, and the Nation; and yet no sooner had the armies, East and West,penetrated Virginia and Tennessee than fugitive slaves appeared within theirlines. They came at night, when the flickering camp-fires shone like vastunsteady stars along the black horizon: old men and thin, with gray and tuftedhair; women with frightened eyes, dragging whimpering hungry children; men andgirls, stalwart and gaunt, -- a horde of starving vagabonds, homeless,helpless, and pitiable, in their dark distress. Two methods of treating thesenewcomers seemed equally logical to opposite sorts of minds. Ben Butler, inVirginia, quickly declared slave property contraband of war, and put thefugitives to work; while Fremont, in Missouri, declared the slaves free undermartial law. Butler's action was approved, but Fremont's was hastilycountermanded, and his successor, Halleck, saw things differently."Hereafter," he commanded, "no slaves should be allowed to comeinto your lines at all; if any come without your knowledge, when owners callfor them deliver them." Such a policy was difficult to enforce; some ofthe black refugees declared themselves freemen, others showed that theirmasters had deserted them, and still others were captured with forts andplantations. Evidently, too, slaves were a source of strength to theConfederacy, and were being used as laborers and producers. "Theyconstitute a military resource," wrote
Page 12
Secretary Cameron, late in 1861; "and being such, that they should not beturned over to the enemy is too plain to discuss." So gradually the toneof the army chiefs changed; Congress forbade the rendition of fugitives, andButler's "contrabands" were welcomed as military laborers. Thiscomplicated rather than solved the problem, for now the scattering fugitivesbecame a steady stream, which flowed faster as the armies marched.
Then the long-headed man with care-chiselled face who satin the White House saw the inevitable, and emancipated the slaves of rebels onNew Year's, 1863. A month later Congress called earnestly for the Negrosoldiers whom the act of July, 1862, had half grudgingly allowed to enlist.Thus the barriers were levelled and the deed was done. The stream of fugitivesswelled to a flood, and anxious army officers kept inquiring: "What mustbe done with slaves, arriving almost daily? Are we to find food and shelter forwomen and children?"
It was a Pierce of Boston who pointed out the way, andthus became in a sense the founder of the Freedmen's Bureau. He was a firmfriend of Secretary Chase; and when, in 1861, the care of slaves and abandonedlands devolved upon the Treasury officials, Pierce was specially detailed fromthe ranks to study the conditions. First, he cared for the refugees at FortressMonroe; and then, after Sherman had captured Hilton Head, Pierce was sent thereto found his Port Royal experiment of making free workingmen out of slaves.Before his experiment was barely started, however, the problem of the fugitiveshad assumed such proportions that it was taken from the hands of theover-burdened Treasury Department and given to the army officials. Alreadycentres of massed freedmen were forming at Fortress Monroe, Washington, NewOrleans, Vicksburg and Corinth, Columbus, Ky., and Cairo, Ill., as well as atPort Royal. Army chaplains found here new and fruitful fields;"superintendents of contrabands" multiplied, and some attempt atsystematic work was made by enlisting the able-bodied men and giving work tothe others.
Then came the Freedmen's Aid societies, born of thetouching appeals from Pierce and from these other centres of distress. Therewas the American Missionary Association,
Page 13
sprung from the Amistad, and now full-grown for work; the various churchorganizations, the National Freedmen's Relief Association, the AmericanFreedmen's Union, the Western Freedmen's Aid Commission, -- in all fifty ormore active organizations, which sent clothes, money, school-books, andteachers southward. All they did was needed, for the destitution of thefreedmen was often reported as "too appalling for belief," and thesituation was daily growing worse rather than better.
And daily, too, it seemed more plain that this was noordinary matter of temporary relief, but a national crisis; for here loomed alabor problem of vast dimensions. Masses of Negroes stood idle, or, if theyworked spasmodically, were never sure of pay; and if perchance they receivedpay, squandered the new thing thoughtlessly. In these and other ways werecamp-life and the new liberty demoralizing the freedmen. The broader economicorganization thus clearly demanded sprang up here and there as accident andlocal conditions determined. Here it was that Pierce's Port Royal plan ofleased plantations and guided workmen pointed out the rough way. In Washingtonthe military governor, at the urgent appeal of the superintendent, openedconfiscated estates to the cultivation of the fugitives, and there in theshadow of the dome gathered black farm villages. General Dix gave over estatesto the freedmen of Fortress Monroe, and so on, South and West. The governmentand benevolent societies furnished the means of cultivation, and the Negroturned again slowly to work. The systems of control, thus started, rapidlygrew, here and there, into strange little governments, like that of GeneralBanks in Louisiana, with its ninety thousand black subjects, its fifty thousandguided laborers, and its annual budget of one hundred thousand dollars andmore. It made out four thousand pay-rolls a year, registered all freedmen,inquired into grievances and redressed them, laid and collected taxes, andestablished a system of public schools. So, too, Colonel Eaton, thesuperintendent of Tennessee and Arkansas, ruled over one hundred thousandfreedmen, leased and cultivated seven thousand acres of cotton land, and fedten thousand paupers a year. In South Carolina was General Saxton, with hisdeep interest in black folk. He
Page 14
succeeded Pierce and the Treasury officials, and sold forfeited estates, leasedabandoned plantations, encouraged schools, and received from Sherman, afterthat terribly picturesque march to the sea, thousands of the wretched campfollowers.
Three characteristic things one might have seen inSherman's raid through Georgia, which threw the new situation in shadowyrelief: the Conqueror, the Conquered, and the Negro. Some see all significancein the grim front of the destroyer, and some in the bitter sufferers of theLost Cause. But to me neither soldier nor fugitive speaks with so deep ameaning as that dark human cloud that clung like remorse on the rear of thoseswift columns, swelling at times to half their size, almost engulfing andchoking them. In vain were they ordered back, in vain were bridges hewn frombeneath their feet; on they trudged and writhed and surged, until they rolledinto Savannah, a starved and naked horde of tens of thousands. There too camethe characteristic military remedy: "The islands from Charleston south,the abandoned rice-fields along the rivers for thirty miles back from the sea,and the country bordering the St. John's River, Florida, are reserved and setapart for the settlement of Negroes now made free by act of war." So readthe celebrated "Field-order Number Fifteen."
All these experiments, orders, and systems were bound toattract and perplex the government and the nation. Directly after theEmancipation Proclamation, Representative Eliot had introduced a bill creatinga Bureau of Emancipation; but it was never reported. The following June acommittee of inquiry, appointed by the Secretary of War, reported in favor of atemporary bureau for the "improvement, protection, and employment ofrefugee freedmen," on much the same lines as were afterwards followed.Petitions came in to President Lincoln from distinguished citizens andorganizations, strongly urging a comprehensive and unified plan of dealing withthe freedmen, under a bureau which should be "charged with the study ofplans and execution of measures for easily guiding, and in every wayjudiciously and humanely aiding, the passage of our emancipated and yet to beemancipated blacks from the old condition of forced labor to their new state ofvoluntary industry."
Some half-hearted steps were taken to accomplish this, in
Page 15
part, by putting the whole matter again in charge of the special Treasuryagents. Laws of 1863 and 1864 directed them to take charge of and leaseabandoned lands for periods not exceeding twelve months, and to "providein such leases, or otherwise, for the employment and general welfare" ofthe freedmen. Most of the army officers greeted this as a welcome relief fromperplexing "Negro affairs," and Secretary Fessenden, July 29, 1864,issued an excellent system of regulations, which were afterward closelyfollowed by General Howard. Under Treasury agents, large quantities of landwere leased in the Mississippi Valley, and many Negroes were employed; but inAugust, 1864, the new regulations were suspended for reasons of "publicpolicy," and the army was again in control.
Meanwhile Congress had turned its attention to thesubject; and in March the House passed a bill by a majority of two establishinga Bureau for Freedmen in the War Department. Charles Sumner, who had charge ofthe bill in the Senate, argued that freedmen and abandoned lands ought to beunder the same department, and reported a substitute for the House billattaching the Bureau to the Treasury Department. This bill passed, but too latefor action by the House. The debates wandered over the whole policy of theadministration and the general question of slavery, without touching veryclosely the specific merits of the measure in hand. Then the national electiontook place; and the administration, with a vote of renewed confidence from thecountry, addressed itself to the matter more seriously. A conference betweenthe two branches of Congress agreed upon a carefully drawn measure whichcontained the chief provisions of Sumner's bill, but made the proposedorganization a department independent of both the War and the Treasuryofficials. The bill was conservative, giving the new department "generalsuperintendence of all freedmen." Its purpose was to "establishregulations" for them, protect them, lease them lands, adjust their wages,and appear in civil and military courts as their "next friend." Therewere many limitations attached to the powers thus granted, and the organizationwas made permanent. Nevertheless, the Senate defeated the bill, and a newconference committee was appointed. This committee reported a new
Page 16
bill, February 28, which was whirled through just as the session closed, andbecame the act of 1865 establishing in the War Department a "Bureau ofRefugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands."
This last compromise was a hasty bit of legislation,vague and uncertain in outline. A Bureau was created, "to continue duringthe present War of Rebellion, and for one year thereafter," to which wasgiven "the supervision and management of all abandoned lands and thecontrol of all subjects relating to refugees and freedmen," under"such rules and regu- lations as may be presented by the head of theBureau and approved by the President." A Commissioner, appointed by thePresident and Senate, was to control the Bureau, with an office force notexceeding ten clerks. The President might also appoint assistant commissionersin the seceded States, and to all these offices military officials might bedetailed at regular pay. The Secretary of War could issue rations, clothing,and fuel to the destitute, and all abandoned property was placed in the handsof the Bureau for eventual lease and sale to ex-slaves in forty-acre parcels.
Thus did the United States government definitely assumecharge of the emancipated Negro as the ward of the nation. It was a tremendousundertaking. Here at a stroke of the pen was erected a government of millionsof men, -- and not ordinary men either, but black men emasculated by apeculiarly complete system of slavery, centuries old; and now, suddenly,violently, they come into a new birthright, at a time of war and passion, inthe midst of the stricken and embittered population of their former masters.Any man might well have hesitated to assume charge of such a work, with vastresponsibilities, indefinite powers, and limited resources. Probably no one buta soldier would have answered such a call promptly; and, indeed, no one but asoldier could be called, for Congress had appropriated no money for salariesand expenses.
Less than a month after the weary Emancipator passed tohis rest, his successor assigned Major-Gen. Oliver O. Howard to duty asCommissioner of the new Bureau. He was a Maine man, then only thirty-five yearsof age. He had marched with Sherman to the sea, had fought well at Gettysburg,and
Page 17
but the year before had been assigned to the command of the Department ofTennessee. An honest man, with too much faith in human nature, little aptitudefor business and intricate detail, he had had large opportunity of becomingacquainted at first hand with much of the work before him. And of that work ithas been truly said that "no approximately correct history of civilizationcan ever be written which does not throw out in bold relief, as one of thegreat landmarks of political and social progress, the organization andadministration of the Freedmen's Bureau."
On May 12, 1865, Howard was appointed; and he assumed theduties of his office promptly on the 15th, and began examining the field ofwork. A curious mess he looked upon: little despotisms, communisticexperiments, slavery, peonage, business speculations, organized charity,unorganized almsgiving, -- all reeling on under the guise of helping thefreedmen, and all enshrined in the smoke and blood of the war and the cursingand silence of angry men. On May 19 the new government -- for a government itreally was -- issued its constitution; commissioners were to be appointed ineach of the seceded states, who were to take charge of "all subjectsrelating to refugees and freedmen," and all relief and rations were to begiven by their consent alone. The Bureau invited continued cooperation withbenevolent societies, and declared: "It will be the object of allcommissioners to introduce practicable systems of compensated labor," andto establish schools. Forthwith nine assistant commissioners were appointed.They were to hasten to their fields of work; seek gradually to close reliefestablishments, and make the destitute self-supporting; act as courts of lawwhere there were no courts, or where Negroes were not recognized in them asfree; establish the institution of marriage among ex-slaves, and keep records;see that freedmen were free to choose their employers, and help in making faircontracts for them; and finally, the circular said: "Simple good faith,for which we hope on all hands for those concerned in the passing away ofslavery, will especially relieve the assistant commissioners in the dischargeof their duties toward the freedmen, as well as promote the generalwelfare."
No sooner was the work thus started, and the general
Page 18
system and local organization in some measure begun, than two gravedifficulties appeared which changed largely the theory and outcome of Bureauwork. First, there were the abandoned lands of the South. It had long been themore or less definitely expressed theory of the North that all the chiefproblems of Emancipation might be settled by establishing the slaves on theforfeited lands of their masters, -- a sort of poetic justice, said some. Butthis poetry done into solemn prose meant either wholesale confiscation ofprivate property in the South, or vast appropriations. Now Congress had notappropriated a cent, and no sooner did the proclamations of general amnestyappear than the eight hundred thousand acres of abandoned lands in the hands ofthe Freedmen's Bureau melted quickly away. The second difficulty lay inperfecting the local organization of the Bureau throughout the wide field ofwork. Making a new machine and sending out officials of duly ascertainedfitness for a great work of social reform is no child's task; but this task waseven harder, for a new central organization had to be fitted on a heterogeneousand confused but already existing system of relief and control of ex-slaves;and the agents available for this work must be sought for in an army still busywith war operations, -- men in the very nature of the case ill fitted fordelicate social work, -- or among the questionable camp followers of aninvading host. Thus, after a year's work, vigorously as it was pushed, theproblem looked even more difficult to grasp and solve than at the beginning.Nevertheless, three things that year's work did, well worth the doing: itrelieved a vast amount of physical suffering; it transported seven thousandfugitives from congested centres back to the farm; and, best of all, itinaugurated the crusade of the New England schoolma'am.
The annals of this Ninth Crusade are yet to be written,-- the tale of a mission that seemed to our age far more quixotic than thequest of St. Louis seemed to his. Behind the mists of ruin and rapine waved thecalico dresses of women who dared, and after the hoarse mouthings of the fieldguns rang the rhythm of the alphabet. Rich and poor they were, serious andcurious. Bereaved now of a father, now of a brother, now of more than these,they came seeking a life work in planting New England schoolhouses among thewhite
Page 19
and black of the South. They did their work well. In that first year theytaught one hundred thousand souls, and more.
Evidently, Congress must soon legislate again on thehastily organized Bureau, which had so quickly grown into wide significance andvast possibilities. An institution such as that was well-nigh as difficult toend as to begin. Early in 1866 Congress took up the matter, when SenatorTrumbull, of Illinois, introduced a bill to extend the Bureau and enlarge itspowers. This measure received, at the hands of Congress, far more thoroughdiscussion and attention than its predecessor. The war cloud had thinned enoughto allow a clearer conception of the work of Emancipation. The champions of thebill argued that the strengthening of the Freedmen's Bureau was still amilitary necessity; that it was needed for the proper carrying out of theThirteenth Amendment, and was a work of sheer justice to the ex-slave, at atrifling cost to the government. The opponents of the measure declared that thewar was over, and the necessity for war measures past; that the Bureau, byreason of its extraordinary powers, was clearly unconstitutional in time ofpeace, and was destined to irritate the South and pauperize the freedmen, at afinal cost of possibly hundreds of millions. These two arguments wereunanswered, and indeed unanswerable: the one that the extraordinary powers ofthe Bureau threatened the civil rights of all citizens; and the other that thegovernment must have power to do what manifestly must be done, and that presentabandonment of the freedmen meant their practical re- enslavement. The billwhich finally passed enlarged and made permanent the Freedmen's Bureau. It waspromptly vetoed by President Johnson as "unconstitutional,""unnecessary," and "extrajudicial," and failed of passageover the veto. Meantime, however, the breach between Congress and the Presidentbegan to broaden, and a modified form of the lost bill was finally passed overthe President's second veto, July 16.
The act of 1866 gave the Freedmen's Bureau its finalform, -- the form by which it will be known to posterity and judged of men. Itextended the existence of the Bureau to July, 1868; it authorized additionalassistant commissioners, the retention of army officers mustered out of regularservice, the sale of certain forfeited lands to freedmen on nominal
Page 20
terms, the sale of Confederate public property for Negro schools, and a widerfield of judicial interpretation and cognizance. The government of theunreconstructed South was thus put very largely in the hands of the Freedmen'sBureau, especially as in many cases the departmental military commander was nowmade also assistant commissioner. It was thus that the Freedmen's Bureau becamea full-fledged government of men. It made laws, executed them and interpretedthem; it laid and collected taxes, defined and punished crime, maintained andused military force, and dictated such measures as it thought necessary andproper for the accomplishment of its varied ends. Naturally, all these powerswere not exercised continuously nor to their fullest extent; and yet, asGeneral Howard has said, "scarcely any subject that has to be legislatedupon in civil society failed, at one time or another, to demand the action ofthis singular Bureau."
To understand and criticise intelligently so vast a work,one must not forget an instant the drift of things in the later sixties. Leehad surrendered, Lincoln was dead, and Johnson and Congress were atloggerheads; the Thirteenth Amend- ment was adopted, the Fourteenth pending,and the Fifteenth declared in force in 1870. Guerrilla raiding, theever-present flickering after-flame of war, was spending its forces against theNegroes, and all the Southern land was awakening as from some wild dream topoverty and social revolution. In a time of perfect calm, amid willingneighbors and streaming wealth, the social uplifting of four million slaves toan assured and self-sustaining place in the body politic and economic wouldhave been a herculean task; but when to the inherent difficulties of sodelicate and nice a social operation were added the spite and hate of conflict,the hell of war; when suspicion and cruelty were rife, and gaunt Hunger weptbeside Bereavement, -- in such a case, the work of any instrument of socialregeneration was in large part foredoomed to failure. The very name of theBureau stood for a thing in the South which for two centuries and better menhad refused even to argue, -- that life amid free Negroes was simplyunthinkable, the maddest of experiments.
The agents that the Bureau could command varied all theway from unselfish philanthropists to narrow-minded busy-
Page 21
bodies and thieves; and even though it be true that the aver- age was farbetter than the worst, it was the occasional fly that helped spoil theointment.
Then amid all crouched the freed slave, bewilderedbetween friend and foe. He had emerged from slavery, -- not the worst slaveryin the world, not a slavery that made all life unbearable, rather a slaverythat had here and there something of kindliness, fidelity, and happiness, --but withal slavery, which, so far as human aspiration and desert wereconcerned, classed the black man and the ox together. And the Negro knew fullwell that, whatever their deeper convictions may have been, Southern men hadfought with desperate energy to perpetuate this slavery under which the blackmasses, with half-articulate thought, had writhed and shivered. They welcomedfreedom with a cry. They shrank from the master who still strove for theirchains; they fled to the friends that had freed them, even though those friendsstood ready to use them as a club for driving the recalcitrant South back intoloyalty. So the cleft between the white and black South grew. Idle to say itnever should have been; it was as inevitable as its results were pitiable.Curiously incongruous elements were left arrayed against each other, -- theNorth, the government, the carpet-bagger, and the slave, here; and there, allthe South that was white, whether gentleman or vagabond, honest man or rascal,lawless murderer or martyr to duty.
Thus it is doubly difficult to write of this periodcalmly, so intense was the feeling, so mighty the human passions that swayedand blinded men. Amid it all, two figures ever stand to typify that day tocoming ages, -- the one, a gray-haired gentleman, whose fathers had quitthemselves like men, whose sons lay in nameless graves; who bowed to the evilof slavery because its abolition threatened untold ill to all; who stood atlast, in the evening of life, a blighted, ruined form, with hate in his eyes;-- and the other, a form hovering dark and mother- like, her awful face blackwith the mists of centuries, had aforetime quailed at that white master'scommand, had bent in love over the cradles of his sons and daughters, andclosed in death the sunken eyes of his wife, -- aye, too, at his behest hadlaid herself low to his lust, and borne a tawny man-child to the world, only tosee her dark boy's limbs scattered to the
Page 22
winds by midnight marauders riding after "damned Nig- gers." Thesewere the saddest sights of that woful day; and no man clasped the hands ofthese two passing figures of the present-past; but, hating, they went to theirlong home, and, hating, their children's children live today.
Here, then, was the field of work for the Freedmen'sBureau; and since, with some hesitation, it was continued by the act of 1868until 1869, let us look upon four years of its work as a whole. There were, in1868, nine hundred Bureau officials scattered from Washington to Texas, ruling,directly and indirectly, many millions of men. The deeds of these rulers fallmainly under seven heads: the relief of physical suffering, the overseeing ofthe beginnings of free labor, the buying and selling of land, the establishmentof schools, the paying of bounties, the administration of justice, and thefinanciering of all these activities.
Up to June, 1869, over half a million patients had beentreated by Bureau physicians and surgeons, and sixty hospi- tals and asylumshad been in operation. In fifty months twenty- one million free rations weredistributed at a cost of over four million dollars. Next came the difficultquestion of labor. First, thirty thousand black men were transported from therefuges and relief stations back to the farms, back to the critical trial of anew way of working. Plain instructions went out from Washington: the laborersmust be free to choose their employers, no fixed rate of wages was prescribed,and there was to be no peonage or forced labor. So far, so good; but wherelocal agents differed toto caelo in capacity and character, where thepersonnel was continually changing, the outcome was necessarily varied.The largest element of suc- cess lay in the fact that the majority of thefreedmen were willing, even eager, to work. So labor contracts were written, --fifty thousand in a single State, -- laborers advised, wages guaranteed, andemployers supplied. In truth, the organiza- tion became a vast labor bureau, --not perfect, indeed, notably defective here and there, but on the wholesuccessful beyond the dreams of thoughtful men. The two great obstacles whichconfronted the officials were the tyrant and the idler, -- the slaveholder whowas determined to perpetuate slavery under
Page 23
another name; and, the freedman who regarded freedom as perpetual rest, -- theDevil and the Deep Sea.
In the work of establishing the Negroes as peasantproprietors, the Bureau was from the first handicapped and at last absolutelychecked. Something was done, and larger things were planned; abandoned landswere leased so long as they remained in the hands of the Bureau, and a totalrevenue of nearly half a million dollars derived from black tenants. Some otherlands to which the nation had gained title were sold on easy terms, and publiclands were opened for settlement to the very few freedmen who had tools andcapital. But the vision of "forty acres and a mule" -- the righteousand reasonable ambition to become a landholder, which the nation had all butcategorically promised the freedmen -- was destined in most cases to bitterdisappointment. And those men of marvellous hindsight who are today seeking topreach the Negro back to the present peonage of the soil know well, or ought toknow, that the opportunity of binding the Negro peasant willingly to the soilwas lost on that day when the Commissioner of the Freedmen's Bureau had to goto South Carolina and tell the weeping freedmen, after their years of toil,that their land was not theirs, that there was a mistake -- somewhere. If by1874 the Georgia Negro alone owned three hundred and fifty thousand acres ofland, it was by grace of his thrift rather than by bounty of the government.
The greatest success of the Freedmen's Bureau lay in theplanting of the free school among Negroes, and the idea of free elementaryeducation among all classes in the South. It not only called theschool-mistresses through the benevolent agencies and built them schoolhouses,but it helped discover and support such apostles of human culture as EdmundWare, Samuel Armstrong, and Erastus Cravath. The opposition to Negro educationin the South was at first bitter, and showed itself in ashes, insult, andblood; for the South believed an educated Negro to be a dangerous Negro. Andthe South was not wholly wrong; for education among all kinds of men always hashad, and always will have, an element of danger and revolution, ofdissatisfaction and discontent. Nevertheless, men strive to know. Perhaps someinkling of this paradox, even in the unquiet days of the Bureau, helped thebayonets
Page 24
allay an opposition to human training which still to-day lies smouldering inthe South, but not flaming. Fisk, Atlanta, Howard, and Hampton were founded inthese days, and six million dollars were expended for educational work, sevenhundred and fifty thousand dollars of which the freedmen themselves gave oftheir poverty.
Such contributions, together with the buying of land andvarious other enterprises, showed that the ex-slave was handling some freecapital already. The chief initial source of this was labor in the army, andhis pay and bounty as a soldier. Payments to Negro soldiers were at firstcomplicated by the ignorance of the recipients, and the fact that the quotas ofcolored regiments from Northern States were largely filled by recruits from theSouth, unknown to their fellow soldiers. Consequently, payments wereaccompanied by such frauds that Congress, by joint resolution in 1867, put thewhole matter in the hands of the Freedmen's Bureau. In two years six milliondollars was thus distributed to five thousand claimants, and in the end the sumexceeded eight million dollars. Even in this system fraud was frequent; butstill the work put needed capital in the hands of practical paupers, and some,at least, was well spent.
The most perplexing and least successful part of theBureau's work lay in the exercise of its judicial functions. The regular Bureaucourt consisted of one representative of the employer, one of the Negro, andone of the Bureau. If the Bureau could have maintained a perfectly judicialattitude, this arrangement would have been ideal, and must in time have gainedconfidence; but the nature of its other activities and the character of itspersonnel prejudiced the Bureau in favor of the black litigants, and ledwithout doubt to much injustice and annoyance. On the other hand, to leave theNegro in the hands of Southern courts was impossible. In a distracted landwhere slavery had hardly fallen, to keep the strong from wanton abuse of theweak, and the weak from gloating insolently over the half-shorn strength of thestrong, was a thankless, hopeless task. The former masters of the land wereperemptorily ordered about, seized, and imprisoned, and punished over andagain, with scant courtesy from army officers. The former slaves wereintimidated, beaten,
Page 25
raped, and butchered by angry and revengeful men. Bureau courts tended tobecome centres simply for punishing whites, while the regular civil courtstended to become solely institu- tions for perpetuating the slavery of blacks.Almost every law and method ingenuity could devise was employed by thelegislatures to reduce the Negroes to serfdom, -- to make them the slaves ofthe State, if not of individual owners; while the Bureau officials too oftenwere found striving to put the "bottom rail on top," and gave thefreedmen a power and independence which they could not yet use. It is all wellenough for us of another generation to wax wise with advice to those who borethe burden in the heat of the day. It is full easy now to see that the man wholost home, fortune, and family at a stroke, and saw his land ruled by"mules and niggers," was really benefited by the passing of slavery.It is not difficult now to say to the young freedman, cheated and cuffed aboutwho has seen his father's head beaten to a jelly and his own mother namelesslyassaulted, that the meek shall inherit the earth. Above all, nothing is moreconvenient than to heap on the Freedmen's Bureau all the evils of that evilday, and damn it utterly for every mistake and blunder that was made.
All this is easy, but it is neither sensible nor just.Someone had blundered, but that was long before Oliver Howard was born; therewas criminal aggression and heedless neglect, but without some system ofcontrol there would have been far more than there was. Had that control beenfrom within, the Negro would have been re-enslaved, to all intents and pur-poses. Coming as the control did from without, perfect men and methods wouldhave bettered all things; and even with imperfect agents and questionablemethods, the work accom- plished was not undeserving of commendation.
Such was the dawn of Freedom; such was the work of theFreedmen's Bureau, which, summed up in brief, may be epitomized thus: for somefifteen million dollars, beside the sums spent before 1865, and the dole ofbenevolent societies, this Bureau set going a system of free labor, establisheda beginning of peasant proprietorship, secured the recognition of blackfreedmen before courts of law, and founded the free common school in the South.On the other hand, it failed to
Page 26
begin the establishment of good-will between ex-masters and freedmen, to guardits work wholly from paternalistic methods which discouraged self-reliance, andto carry out to any considerable extent its implied promises to furnish thefreedmen with land. Its successes were the result of hard work, supplemented bythe aid of philanthropists and the eager striving of black men. Its failureswere the result of bad local agents, the inherent difficulties of the work, andnational neglect.
Such an institution, from its wide powers, greatresponsibilities, large control of moneys, and generally conspicuous position,was naturally open to repeated and bitter attack. It sustained a searchingCongressional investigation at the instance of Fernando Wood in 1870. Itsarchives and few remaining functions were with blunt discourtesy transferredfrom Howard's control, in his absence, to the supervision of Secretary of WarBelknap in 1872, on the Secretary's recommendation. Finally, in consequence ofgrave intimations of wrong-doing made by the Secretary and his subordinates,General Howard was court-martialed in 1874. In both of these trials theCommissioner of the Freedmen's Bureau was officially exonerated from any wilfulmisdoing, and his work commended. Nevertheless, many unpleasant things werebrought to light, -- the methods of transacting the business of the Bureau werefaulty; several cases of defalcation were proved, and other frauds stronglysuspected; there were some business transactions which savored of dangerousspecula- tion, if not dishonesty; and around it all lay the smirch of theFreedmen's Bank.
Morally and practically, the Freedmen's Bank was part ofthe Freedmen's Bureau, although it had no legal connection with it. With theprestige of the government back of it, and a directing board of unusualrespectability and national reputation, this banking institution had made aremarkable start in the development of that thrift among black folk whichslavery had kept them from knowing. Then in one sad day came the crash, -- allthe hard-earned dollars of the freedmen disappeared; but that was the least ofthe loss, -- all the faith in saving went too, and much of the faith in men;and that was a loss that a Nation which to-day sneers at Negro shiftlessnesshas never yet made good. Not even ten additional years of
Page 27
slavery could have done so much to throttle the thrift of the freedmen as themismanagement and bankruptcy of the series of savings banks chartered by theNation for their especial aid. Where all the blame should rest, it is hard tosay; whether the Bureau and the Bank died chiefly by reason of the blows of itsselfish friends or the dark machinations of its foes, perhaps even time willnever reveal, for here lies unwritten history.
Of the foes without the Bureau, the bitterest were thosewho attacked not so much its conduct or policy under the law as the necessityfor any such institution at all. Such attacks came primarily from the BorderStates and the South; and they were summed up by Senator Davis, of Kentucky,when he moved to entitle the act of 1866 a bill "to promote strife andconflict between the white and black races . . . by a grant of unconstitutionalpower." The argument gathered tremendous strength South and North; but itsvery strength was its weakness. For, argued the plain common-sense of thenation, if it is unconstitutional, unpractical, and futile for the nation tostand guardian over its helpless wards, then there is left but one alternative,-- to make those wards their own guardians by arming them with the ballot.Moreover, the path of the practical politician pointed the same way; for,argued this opportunist, if we cannot peacefully reconstruct the South withwhite votes, we certainly can with black votes. So justice and force joinedhands.
The alternative thus offered the nation was not betweenfull and restricted Negro suffrage; else every sensible man, black and white,would easily have chosen the latter. It was rather a choice between suffrageand slavery, after endless blood and gold had flowed to sweep human bondageaway. Not a single Southern legislature stood ready to admit a Negro, under anyconditions, to the polls; not a single Southern legislature believed free Negrolabor was possible without a system of restrictions that took all its freedomaway; there was scarcely a white man in the South who did not honestly regardEmancipation as a crime, and its practical nullification as a duty. In such asituation, the granting of the ballot to the black man was a necessity, thevery least a guilty nation could grant a wronged race, and the only method ofcompelling the South
Page 28
to accept the results of the war. Thus Negro suffrage ended a civil war bybeginning a race feud. And some felt gratitude toward the race thus sacrificedin its swaddling clothes on the altar of national integrity; and some felt andfeel only indifference and contempt.
Had political exigencies been less pressing, theopposition to government guardianship of Negroes less bitter, and theattachment to the slave system less strong, the social seer can well imagine afar better policy, -- a permanent Freedmen's Bureau, with a national system ofNegro schools; a carefully supervised employment and labor office; a system ofimpartial protection before the regular courts; and such institutions forsocial betterment as savings-banks, land and building associations, and socialsettlements. All this vast expenditure of money and brains might have formed agreat school of prospective citizenship, and solved in a way we have not yetsolved the most perplexing and persistent of the Negro problems.
That such an institution was unthinkable in 1870 was duein part to certain acts of the Freedmen's Bureau itself. It came to regard itswork as merely temporary, and Negro suffrage as a final answer to all presentperplexities. The political ambition of many of its agents and protegesled it far afield into questionable activities, until the South, nursing itsown deep prejudices, came easily to ignore all the good deeds of the Bureau andhate its very name with perfect hatred. So the Freedmen's Bureau died, and itschild was the Fifteenth Amendment.
The passing of a great human institution before its workis done, like the untimely passing of a single soul, but leaves a legacy ofstriving for other men. The legacy of the Freedmen's Bureau is the heavyheritage of this generation. To-day, when new and vaster problems are destinedto strain every fibre of the national mind and soul, would it not be well tocount this legacy honestly and carefully? For this much all men know: despitecompromise, war, and struggle, the Negro is not free. In the backwoods of theGulf States, for miles and miles, he may not leave the plantation of his birth;in well-nigh the whole rural South the black farmers are peons, bound by lawand custom to an economic slavery, from which the only
Page 29
escape is death or the penitentiary. In the most cultured sections and citiesof the South the Negroes are a segregated servile caste, with restricted rightsand privileges. Before the courts, both in law and custom, they stand on adifferent and peculiar basis. Taxation without representation is the rule oftheir political life. And the result of all this is, and in nature must havebeen, lawlessness and crime. That is the large legacy of the Freedmen's Bureau,the work it did not do because it could not.
I have seen a land right merry with the sun, wherechildren sing, and rolling hills lie like passioned women wanton with harvest.And there in the King's Highways sat and sits a figure veiled and bowed, bywhich the traveller's footsteps hasten as they go. On the tainted air broodsfear. Three centuries' thought has been the raising and unveiling of that bowedhuman heart, and now behold a century new for the duty and the deed. Theproblem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line.
Page 30
From birth till death enslaved; in word, in deed, unmanned!
* * * * * * * * *
Hereditary bondsmen! Know ye not
Who would be free themselves must strike the blow?
BYRON.
Easily the most striking thing in the history of theAmerican Negro since 1876 is the ascendancy of Mr. Booker T. Washington. Itbegan at the time when war memories and ideals were rapidly passing; a day ofastonishing commercial devel- opment was dawning; a sense of doubt andhesitation overtook the freedmen's sons, -- then it was that his leading began.Mr. Washington came, with a simple definite programme, at the psychologicalmoment when the nation was a little ashamed of having bestowed so muchsentiment on Negroes, and was concentrating its energies on Dollars. Hisprogramme of industrial education, conciliation of the South, and submissionand silence as to civil and political rights, was not wholly original; the FreeNegroes from 1830 up to war-time had striven to build industrial schools, andthe American Missionary Association had from the first taught various trades;and
Page 31
Price and others had sought a way of honorable alliance with the best of theSoutherners. But Mr. Washington first indissolubly linked these things; he putenthusiasm, unlimited energy, and perfect faith into his programme, and changedit from a by-path into a veritable Way of Life. And the tale of the methods bywhich he did this is a fascinating study of human life.
It startled the nation to hear a Negro advocating such aprogramme after many decades of bitter complaint; it startled and won theapplause of the South, it interested and won the admiration of the North; andafter a confused murmur of protest, it silenced if it did not convert theNegroes themselves.
To gain the sympathy and cooperation of the variouselements comprising the white South was Mr. Washington's first task; and this,at the time Tuskegee was founded, seemed, for a black man, well-nighimpossible. And yet ten years later it was done in the word spoken at Atlanta:"In all things purely social we can be as separate as the five fingers,and yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress." This"Atlanta Compromise" is by all odds the most notable thing in Mr.Washington's career. The South interpreted it in different ways: the radicalsreceived it as a complete surrender of the demand for civil and politicalequality; the conservatives, as a generously conceived working basis for mutualunderstanding. So both approved it, and to-day its author is certainly the mostdistinguished Southerner since Jefferson Davis, and the one with the largestpersonal following.
Next to this achievement comes Mr. Washington's work ingaining place and consideration in the North. Others less shrewd and tactfulhad formerly essayed to sit on these two stools and had fallen between them;but as Mr. Washington knew the heart of the South from birth and training, soby singular insight he intuitively grasped the spirit of the age which wasdominating the North. And so thoroughly did he learn the speech and thought oftriumphant commercialism, and the ideals of material prosperity, that thepicture of a lone black boy poring over a French grammar amid the weeds anddirt of a neglected home soon seemed to him the acme of absurdities. Onewonders what Socrates and St. Francis of Assisi would say to this.
Page 32
And yet this very singleness of vision and thoroughoneness with his age is a mark of the successful man. It is as though Naturemust needs make men narrow in order to give them force. So Mr. Washington'scult has gained unquestioning followers, his work has wonderfully prospered,his friends are legion, and his enemies are confounded. To-day he stands as theone recognized spokesman of his ten million fellows, and one of the mostnotable figures in a nation of seventy millions. One hesitates, therefore, tocriticise a life which, beginning with so little, has done so much. And yet thetime is come when one may speak in all sincerity and utter courtesy of themistakes and shortcomings of Mr. Washington's career, as well as of histriumphs, without being thought captious or envious, and without forgettingthat it is easier to do ill than well in the world.
The criticism that has hitherto met Mr. Washington hasnot always been of this broad character. In the South especially has he had towalk warily to avoid the harshest judgments, -- and naturally so, for he isdealing with the one subject of deepest sensitiveness to that section. Twice --once when at the Chicago celebration of the Spanish-American War he alluded tothe color-prejudice that is "eating away the vitals of the South,"and once when he dined with President Roosevelt -- has the resulting Southerncriticism been violent enough to threaten seriously his popularity. In theNorth the feeling has several times forced itself into words, that Mr.Washington's counsels of submission overlooked certain ele- ments of truemanhood, and that his educational programme was unnecessarily narrow. Usually,however, such criticism has not found open expression, although, too, thespiritual sons of the Abolitionists have not been prepared to acknowl- edgethat the schools founded before Tuskegee, by men of broad ideals andself-sacrificing spirit, were wholly failures or worthy of ridicule. While,then, criticism has not failed to follow Mr. Washington, yet the prevailingpublic opinion of the land has been but too willing to deliver the solution ofa wearisome problem into his hands, and say, "If that is all you and yourrace ask, take it."
Among his own people, however, Mr. Washington hasencountered the strongest and most lasting opposition, amounting
Page 33
at times to bitterness, and even today continuing strong and insistent eventhough largely silenced in outward expression by the public opinion of thenation. Some of this opposition is, of course, mere envy; the disappointment ofdisplaced demagogues and the spite of narrow minds. But aside from this, thereis among educated and thoughtful colored men in all parts of the land a feelingof deep regret, sorrow, and apprehension at the wide currency and ascendancywhich some of Mr. Washington's theories have gained. These same men admire hissincerity of purpose, and are willing to forgive much to honest endeavor whichis doing something worth the doing. They cooperate with Mr. Washington as faras they conscientiously can; and, indeed, it is no ordinary tribute to thisman's tact and power that, steering as he must between so many diverseinterests and opinions, he so largely retains the respect of all.
But the hushing of the criticism of honest opponents is adangerous thing. It leads some of the best of the critics to unfortunatesilence and paralysis of effort, and others to burst into speech sopassionately and intemperately as to lose listeners. Honest and earnestcriticism from those whose interests are most nearly touched, -- criticism ofwriters by readers, -- this is the soul of democracy and the safeguard ofmodern society. If the best of the American Negroes receive by outer pressure aleader whom they had not recognized before, manifestly there is here a certainpalpable gain. Yet there is also irreparable loss, -- a loss of that peculiarlyvaluable educa- tion which a group receives when by search and criticism itfinds and commissions its own leaders. The way in which this is done is at oncethe most elementary and the nicest problem of social growth. History is but therecord of such group- leadership; and yet how infinitely changeful is its typeand character! And of all types and kinds, what can be more instructive thanthe leadership of a group within a group? -- that curious double movement wherereal progress may be negative and actual advance be relative retrogression. Allthis is the social student's inspiration and despair.
Now in the past the American Negro has had instructiveexperience in the choosing of group leaders, founding thus a
Page 34
peculiar dynasty which in the light of present conditions is worth whilestudying. When sticks and stones and beasts form the sole environment of apeople, their attitude is largely one of determined opposition to and conquestof natural forces. But when to earth and brute is added an environment of menand ideas, then the attitude of the imprisoned group may take three main forms,-- a feeling of revolt and revenge; an attempt to adjust all thought and actionto the will of the greater group; or, finally, a determined effort atself-realization and self-development despite environing opinion. The influenceof all of these attitudes at various times can be traced in the history of theAmerican Negro, and in the evolution of his successive leaders.
Before 1750, while the fire of African freedom stillburned in the veins of the slaves, there was in all leadership or attemptedleadership but the one motive of revolt and revenge, -- typified in theterrible Maroons, the Danish blacks, and Cato of Stono, and veiling all theAmericas in fear of insurrection. The liberalizing tendencies of the latterhalf of the eighteenth century brought, along with kindlier relations betweenblack and white, thoughts of ultimate adjustment and assimilation. Suchaspiration was especially voiced in the earnest songs of Phyllis, in themartyrdom of Attucks, the fighting of Salem and Poor, the intellectualaccomplishments of Banneker and Derham, and the political demands of theCuffes.
Stern financial and social stress after the war cooledmuch of the previous humanitarian ardor. The disappointment and impatience ofthe Negroes at the persistence of slavery and serfdom voiced itself in twomovements. The slaves in the South, aroused undoubtedly by vague rumors of theHaytian revolt, made three fierce attempts at insurrection, -- in 1800 underGabriel in Virginia, in 1822 under Vesey in Carolina, and in 1831 again inVirginia under the terrible Nat Turner. In the Free States, on the other hand,a new and curious attempt at self-development was made. In Philadelphia and NewYork color-prescription led to a withdrawal of Negro communicants from whitechurches and the formation of a peculiar socio-religious institution among theNegroes known as the African Church, -- an organization still living andcontrolling in its various branches over a million of men.
Page 35
Walker's wild appeal against the trend of the times showed how the world waschanging after the coming of the cotton- gin. By 1830 slavery seemed hopelesslyfastened on the South, and the slaves thoroughly cowed into submission. Thefree Negroes of the North, inspired by the mulatto immigrants from the WestIndies, began to change the basis of their demands; they recognized the slaveryof slaves, but insisted that they themselves were freemen, and soughtassimilation and amalgamation with the nation on the same terms with other men.Thus, Forten and Purvis of Philadelphia, Shad of Wilmington, Du Bois of NewHaven, Barbadoes of Boston, and others, strove singly and together as men, theysaid, not as slaves; as "people of color," not as"Negroes." The trend of the times, however, refused them recognitionsave in individual and exceptional cases, considered them as one with all thedespised blacks, and they soon found themselves striving to keep even therights they formerly had of voting and working and moving as freemen. Schemesof migration and colonization arose among them; but these they refused toentertain, and they eventually turned to the Abolition movement as a finalrefuge.
Here, led by Remond, Nell, Wells-Brown, and Douglass, anew period of self-assertion and self-development dawned. To be sure, ultimatefreedom and assimilation was the ideal before the leaders, but the assertion ofthe manhood rights of the Negro by himself was the main reliance, and JohnBrown's raid was the extreme of its logic. After the war and eman- cipation,the great form of Frederick Douglass, the greatest of American Negro leaders,still led the host. Self-assertion, especially in political lines, was the mainprogramme, and behind Douglass came Elliot, Bruce, and Langston, and theReconstruction politicians, and, less conspicuous but of greater socialsignificance, Alexander Crummell and Bishop Daniel Payne.
Then came the Revolution of 1876, the suppression of theNegro votes, the changing and shifting of ideals, and the seeking of new lightsin the great night. Douglass, in his old age, still bravely stood for theideals of his early manhood, -- ultimate assimilation through self-assertion,and on no other terms. For a time Price arose as a new leader, destined, it
Page 36
seemed, not to give up, but to re-state the old ideals in a form less repugnantto the white South. But he passed away in his prime. Then came the new leader.Nearly all the former ones had become leaders by the silent suffrage of theirfellows, had sought to lead their own people alone, and were usually, saveDouglass, little known outside their race. But Booker T. Washington arose asessentially the leader not of one race but of two, -- a compromiser between theSouth, the North, and the Negro. Naturally the Negroes resented, at firstbitterly, signs of compromise which surrendered their civil and politi- calrights, even though this was to be exchanged for larger chances of economicdevelopment. The rich and dominating North, however, was not only weary of therace problem, but was investing largely in Southern enterprises, and welcomedany method of peaceful cooperation. Thus, by national opinion, the Negroesbegan to recognize Mr. Washington's leadership; and the voice of criticism washushed.
Mr. Washington represents in Negro thought the oldattitude of adjustment and submission; but adjustment at such a peculiar timeas to make his programme unique. This is an age of unusual economicdevelopment, and Mr. Washington's programme naturally takes an economic cast,becoming a gospel of Work and Money to such an extent as apparently almostcompletely to overshadow the higher aims of life. Moreover, this is an age whenthe more advanced races are coming in closer contact with the less developedraces, and the race-feeling is therefore intensified; and Mr. Washington'sprogramme practically accepts the alleged inferiority of the Negro races.Again, in our own land, the reaction from the sentiment of war time has givenimpetus to race-prejudice against Negroes, and Mr. Washington withdraws many ofthe high demands of Negroes as men and American citizens. In other periods ofintensified prejudice all the Negro's tendency to self-assertion has beencalled forth; at this period a policy of submission is advocated. In thehistory of nearly all other races and peoples the doctrine preached at suchcrises has been that manly self-respect is worth more than lands and houses,and that a people who voluntarily surrender such respect, or cease striving forit, are not worth civilizing.
In answer to this, it has been claimed that the Negro can
Page 37
survive only through submission. Mr. Washington distinctly asks that blackpeople give up, at least for the present, three things, --
First, political power,
Second, insistence on civil rights,
Third, higher education of Negro youth, --
and concentrate all their energies on industrialeducation, and accumulation of wealth, and the conciliation of the South. Thispolicy has been courageously and insistently advocated for over fifteen years,and has been triumphant for perhaps ten years. As a result of this tender ofthe palm-branch, what has been the return? In these years there have occurred:
1. The disfranchisement of the Negro.
2. The legal creation of a distinct status of civilinferiority for the Negro.
3. The steady withdrawal of aid from institutions for thehigher training of the Negro.
These movements are not, to be sure, direct results ofMr. Washington's teachings; but his propaganda has, without a shadow of doubt,helped their speedier accomplishment. The question then comes: Is it possible,and probable, that nine millions of men can make effective progress in economiclines if they are deprived of political rights, made a servile caste, andallowed only the most meagre chance for develop- ing their exceptional men? Ifhistory and reason give any distinct answer to these questions, it is anemphatic No. And Mr. Washington thus faces the triple paradox of hiscareer:
1. He is striving nobly to make Negro artisans businessmen and property-owners; but it is utterly impossible, under modern competitivemethods, for workingmen and property- owners to defend their rights and existwithout the right of suffrage.
2. He insists on thrift and self-respect, but at the sametime counsels a silent submission to civic inferiority such as is bound to sapthe manhood of any race in the long run.
3. He advocates common-school and industrial training,and depreciates institutions of higher learning; but neither the Negrocommon-schools, nor Tuskegee itself, could remain open a day were it not forteachers trained in Negro colleges, or trained by their graduates.
Page 38
This triple paradox in Mr. Washington's position is theobject of criticism by two classes of colored Americans. One class isspiritually descended from Toussaint the Savior, through Gabriel, Vesey, andTurner, and they represent the attitude of revolt and revenge; they hate thewhite South blindly and distrust the white race generally, and so far as theyagree on definite action, think that the Negro's only hope lies in emigrationbeyond the borders of the United States. And yet, by the irony of fate, nothinghas more effectually made this programme seem hopeless than the recent courseof the United States toward weaker and darker peoples in the West Indies,Hawaii, and the Philippines, -- for where in the world may we go and be safefrom lying and brute force?
The other class of Negroes who cannot agree with Mr.Washington has hitherto said little aloud. They deprecate the sight ofscattered counsels, of internal disagreement; and especially they dislikemaking their just criticism of a useful and earnest man an excuse for a generaldischarge of venom from small-minded opponents. Nevertheless, the questionsinvolved are so fundamental and serious that it is difficult to see how menlike the Grimkes, Kelly Miller, J. W. E. Bowen, and other representatives ofthis group, can much longer be silent. Such men feel in conscience bound to askof this nation three things:
They acknowledge Mr. Washington's invaluable service incounselling patience and courtesy in such demands; they do not ask thatignorant black men vote when ignorant whites are debarred, or that anyreasonable restrictions in the suffrage should not be applied; they know thatthe low social level of the mass of the race is responsible for muchdiscrimination against it, but they also know, and the nation knows, thatrelentless color-prejudice is more often a cause than a result of the Negro'sdegradation; they seek the abatement of this relic of barbarism, and not itssystematic encouragement and pampering by all agencies of social power from theAssociated Press to the Church of Christ. They advocate, with Mr. Washington, abroad system of Negro common schools supplemented
Page 39
by thorough industrial training; but they are surprised that a man of Mr.Washington's insight cannot see that no such educational system ever has restedor can rest on any other basis than that of the well-equipped college anduniversity, and they insist that there is a demand for a few such institutionsthroughout the South to train the best of the Negro youth as teachers,professional men, and leaders.
This group of men honor Mr. Washington for his attitudeof conciliation toward the white South; they accept the "AtlantaCompromise" in its broadest interpretation; they recog- nize, with him,many signs of promise, many men of high purpose and fair judgment, in thissection; they know that no easy task has been laid upon a region alreadytottering under heavy burdens. But, nevertheless, they insist that the way totruth and right lies in straightforward honesty, not in indiscriminateflattery; in praising those of the South who do well and criticisinguncompromisingly those who do ill; in taking advantage of the opportunities athand and urging their fellows to do the same, but at the same time inremembering that only a firm adherence to their higher ideals and aspirationswill ever keep those ideals within the realm of possibility. They do not expectthat the free right to vote, to enjoy civic rights, and to be educated, willcome in a moment; they do not expect to see the bias and prejudices of yearsdisappear at the blast of a trumpet; but they are absolutely certain that theway for a people to gain their reasonable rights is not by voluntarily throwingthem away and insisting that they do not want them; that the way for a peopleto gain respect is not by continually belittling and ridiculing themselves;that, on the contrary, Negroes must insist continually, in season and out ofseason, that voting is necessary to modern manhood, that color discriminationis barbarism, and that black boys need education as well as white boys.
In failing thus to state plainly and unequivocally thelegitimate demands of their people, even at the cost of opposing an honoredleader, the thinking classes of American Negroes would shirk a heavyresponsibility, -- a responsibility to themselves, a responsibility to thestruggling masses, a responsibility to the darker races of men whose futuredepends so largely on this American experiment, but especially a responsibility
Page 40
to this nation, -- this common Fatherland. It is wrong to encourage a man or apeople in evil-doing; it is wrong to aid and abet a national crime simplybecause it is unpopular not to do so. The growing spirit of kindliness andreconciliation between the North and South after the frightful difference of ageneration ago ought to be a source of deep congratulation to all, andespecially to those whose mistreatment caused the war; but if thatreconciliation is to be marked by the industrial slavery and civic death ofthose same black men, with permanent legislation into a position ofinferiority, then those black men, if they are really men, are called upon byevery consideration of patriotism and loyalty to oppose such a course by allcivilized methods, even though such opposition involves disagreement with Mr.Booker T. Washington. We have no right to sit silently by while the inevitableseeds are sown for a harvest of disaster to our children, black and white.
First, it is the duty of black men to judge the Southdiscriminatingly. The present generation of Southerners are not responsible forthe past, and they should not be blindly hated or blamed for it. Furthermore,to no class is the indiscriminate endorsement of the recent course of the Southtoward Negroes more nauseating than to the best thought of the South. The Southis not "solid"; it is a land in the ferment of social change, whereinforces of all kinds are fighting for supremacy; and to praise the ill the Southis today perpetrating is just as wrong as to condemn the good. Discriminatingand broad-minded criticism is what the South needs, -- needs it for the sake ofher own white sons and daughters, and for the insurance of robust, healthymental and moral development.
Today even the attitude of the Southern whites toward theblacks is not, as so many assume, in all cases the same; the ignorantSoutherner hates the Negro, the workingmen fear his competition, themoney-makers wish to use him as a laborer, some of the educated see a menace inhis upward development, while others -- usually the sons of the masters -- wishto help him to rise. National opinion has enabled this last class to maintainthe Negro common schools, and to protect the Negro partially in property, life,and limb. Through the pressure
Page 41
of the money-makers, the Negro is in danger of being reduced to semi-slavery,especially in the country districts; the workingmen, and those of the educatedwho fear the Negro, have united to disfranchise him, and some have urged hisdeportation; while the passions of the ignorant are easily aroused to lynch andabuse any black man. To praise this intricate whirl of thought and prejudice isnonsense; to in- veigh indiscriminately against "the South" isunjust; but to use the same breath in praising Governor Aycock, exposingSenator Morgan, arguing with Mr. Thomas Nelson Page, and denouncing Senator BenTillman, is not only sane, but the imperative duty of thinking black men.
It would be unjust to Mr. Washington not to acknowledgethat in several instances he has opposed movements in the South which wereunjust to the Negro; he sent memorials to the Louisiana and Alabamaconstitutional conventions, he has spoken against lynching, and in other wayshas openly or silently set his influence against sinister schemes andunfortunate happenings. Notwithstanding this, it is equally true to assert thaton the whole the distinct impression left by Mr. Washington's propaganda is,first, that the South is justified in its present attitude toward the Negrobecause of the Negro's degradation; secondly, that the prime cause of theNegro's failure to rise more quickly is his wrong education in the past; and,thirdly, that his future rise depends primarily on his own efforts. Each ofthese propositions is a dangerous half-truth. The supplementary truths mustnever be lost sight of: first, slavery and race-prejudice are potent if notsufficient causes of the Negro's position; second, industrial and common-school training were necessarily slow in planting because they had to await theblack teachers trained by higher institutions, -- it being extremely doubtfulif any essentially different develop- ment was possible, and certainly aTuskegee was unthinkable before 1880; and, third, while it is a great truth tosay that the Negro must strive and strive mightily to help himself, it isequally true that unless his striving be not simply seconded, but ratheraroused and encouraged, by the initiative of the richer and wiser environinggroup, he cannot hope for great success.
In his failure to realize and impress this last point,Mr.
Page 42
Washington is especially to be criticised. His doctrine has tended to make thewhites, North and South, shift the burden of the Negro problem to the Negro'sshoulders and stand aside as critical and rather pessimistic spectators; whenin fact the burden belongs to the nation, and the hands of none of us are cleanif we bend not our energies to righting these great wrongs.
The South ought to be led, by candid and honestcriticism, to assert her better self and do her full duty to the race she hascruelly wronged and is still wronging. The North -- her co- partner in guilt --cannot salve her conscience by plastering it with gold. We cannot settle thisproblem by diplomacy and suaveness, by "policy" alone. If worse cometo worst, can the moral fibre of this country survive the slow throttling andmurder of nine millions of men?
The black men of America have a duty to perform, a dutystern and delicate, -- a forward movement to oppose a part of the work of theirgreatest leader. So far as Mr. Washington preaches Thrift, Patience, andIndustrial Training for the masses, we must hold up his hands and strive withhim, rejoicing in his honors and glorying in the strength of this Joshua calledof God and of man to lead the headless host. But so far as Mr. Washingtonapologizes for injustice, North or South, does not rightly value the privilegeand duty of voting, belittles the emasculating effects of caste distinctions,and opposes the higher training and ambition of our brighter minds, -- so faras he, the South, or the Nation, does this, -- we must unceasingly and firmlyoppose them. By every civilized and peaceful method we must strive for therights which the world accords to men, clinging unwaveringly to those greatwords which the sons of the Fathers would fain forget: "We hold thesetruths to be self-evident: That all men are created equal; that they areendowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these arelife, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."
Page 43
Willst Du Deine Macht verkunden,
Wahle sie die frei von Sunden,
Steh'n in Deinem ew'gen Haus!
Deine Geister sende aus!
Die Unsterblichen, die Reinen,
Die nicht fuhlen, die nicht weinen!
Nicht die zarte Jungfrau wahle,
Nicht der Hirtin weiche Seele!
SCHILLER.
Once upon a time I taught school in the hills ofTennessee, where the broad dark vale of the Mississippi begins to roll andcrumple to greet the Alleghanies. I was a Fisk student then, and all Fisk menthought that Tennessee -- beyond the Veil -- was theirs alone, and in vacationtime they sallied forth in lusty bands to meet the county school-commissioners.Young and happy, I too went, and I shall not soon forget that summer, seventeenyears ago.
First, there was a Teachers' Institute at thecounty-seat; and there distinguished guests of the superintendent taught theteachers fractions and spelling and other mysteries, -- white
Page 44
teachers in the morning, Negroes at night. A picnic now and then, and a supper,and the rough world was softened by laughter and song. I remember how -- But Iwander.
There came a day when all the teachers left the Instituteand began the hunt for schools. I learn from hearsay (for my mother wasmortally afraid of firearms) that the hunting of ducks and bears and men iswonderfully interesting, but I am sure that the man who has never hunted acountry school has something to learn of the pleasures of the chase. I see nowthe white, hot roads lazily rise and fall and wind before me under the burningJuly sun; I feel the deep weariness of heart and limb as ten, eight, six milesstretch relentlessly ahead; I feel my heart sink heavily as I hear again andagain, "Got a teacher? Yes." So I walked on and on -- horses were tooexpensive -- until I had wandered beyond railways, beyond stage lines, to aland of "varmints" and rattlesnakes, where the coming of a strangerwas an event, and men lived and died in the shadow of one blue hill.
Sprinkled over hill and dale lay cabins and farmhouses,shut out from the world by the forests and the rolling hills toward the east.There I found at last a little school. Josie told me of it; she was a thin,homely girl of twenty, with a dark-brown face and thick, hard hair. I hadcrossed the stream at Watertown, and rested under the great willows; then I hadgone to the little cabin in the lot where Josie was resting on her way to town.The gaunt farmer made me welcome, and Josie, hearing my errand, told meanxiously that they wanted a school over the hill; that but once since the warhad a teacher been there; that she herself longed to learn, -- and thus she ranon, talking fast and loud, with much earnestness and energy.
Next morning I crossed the tall round hill, lingered tolook at the blue and yellow mountains stretching toward the Carolinas, thenplunged into the wood, and came out at Josie's home. It was a dull framecottage with four rooms, perched just below the brow of the hill, amidpeach-trees. The father was a quiet, simple soul, calmly ignorant, with notouch of vulgarity. The mother was different, -- strong, bustling, andenergetic, with a quick, restless tongue, and an ambition to live "likefolks." There was a crowd of children. Two boys
Page 45
had gone away. There remained two growing girls; a shy midget of eight; John,tall, awkward, and eighteen; Jim, younger, quicker, and better looking; and twobabies of indefinite age. Then there was Josie herself. She seemed to be thecentre of the family: always busy at service, or at home, or berry-picking; alittle nervous and inclined to scold, like her mother, yet faithful, too, likeher father. She had about her a certain fineness, the shadow of an unconsciousmoral heroism that would willingly give all of life to make life broader,deeper, and fuller for her and hers. I saw much of this family afterwards, andgrew to love them for their honest efforts to be decent and comfortable, andfor their knowledge of their own ignorance. There was with them no affectation.The mother would scold the father for being so "easy"; Josie wouldroundly berate the boys for carelessness; and all knew that it was a hard thingto dig a living out of a rocky side-hill.
I secured the school. I remember the day I rode horsebackout to the commissioner's house with a pleasant young white fellow who wantedthe white school. The road ran down the bed of a stream; the sun laughed andthe water jingled, and we rode on. "Come in," said the commissioner,-- "come in. Have a seat. Yes, that certificate will do. Stay to dinner.What do you want a month?" "Oh," thought I, "this islucky"; but even then fell the awful shadow of the Veil, for they atefirst, then I -- alone.
The schoolhouse was a log hut, where Colonel Wheeler usedto shelter his corn. It sat in a lot behind a rail fence and thorn bushes, nearthe sweetest of springs. There was an entrance where a door once was, andwithin, a massive rickety fireplace; great chinks between the logs served aswindows. Furniture was scarce. A pale blackboard crouched in the corner. Mydesk was made of three boards, reinforced at critical points, and my chair,borrowed from the landlady, had to be returned every night. Seats for thechildren -- these puzzled me much. I was haunted by a New England vision ofneat little desks and chairs, but, alas! the reality was rough plank bencheswithout backs, and at times without legs. They had the one virtue of makingnaps dangerous, -- possibly fatal, for the floor was not to be trusted.
Page 46
It was a hot morning late in July when the school opened.I trembled when I heard the patter of little feet down the dusty road, and sawthe growing row of dark solemn faces and bright eager eyes facing me. Firstcame Josie and her brothers and sisters. The longing to know, to be a studentin the great school at Nashville, hovered like a star above this child-womanamid her work and worry, and she studied doggedly. There were the Dowells fromtheir farm over toward Alexandria, -- Fanny, with her smooth black face andwondering eyes; Martha, brown and dull; the pretty girl-wife of a brother, andthe younger brood.
There were the Burkes, -- two brown and yellow lads, anda tiny haughty-eyed girl. Fat Reuben's little chubby girl came, with goldenface and old-gold hair, faithful and solemn. 'Thenie was on hand early, -- ajolly, ugly, good-hearted girl, who slyly dipped snuff and looked after herlittle bow- legged brother. When her mother could spare her, 'Tildy came, -- amidnight beauty, with starry eyes and tapering limbs; and her brother,correspondingly homely. And then the big boys, -- the hulking Lawrences; thelazy Neills, unfathered sons of mother and daughter; Hickman, with a stoop inhis shoulders; and the rest.
There they sat, nearly thirty of them, on the roughbenches, their faces shading from a pale cream to a deep brown, the little feetbare and swinging, the eyes full of expectation, with here and there a twinkleof mischief, and the hands grasping Webster's blue-black spelling-book. I lovedmy school, and the fine faith the children had in the wisdom of their teacherwas truly marvellous. We read and spelled together, wrote a little, pickedflowers, sang, and listened to stories of the world beyond the hill. At timesthe school would dwindle away, and I would start out. I would visit MunEddings, who lived in two very dirty rooms, and ask why little Lugene, whoseflaming face seemed ever ablaze with the dark-red hair uncombed, was absent alllast week, or why I missed so often the inimitable rags of Mack and Ed. Thenthe father, who worked Colonel Wheeler's farm on shares, would tell me how thecrops needed the boys; and the thin, slovenly mother, whose face was prettywhen washed, assured me that Lugene must mind the baby. "But we'll startthem again next week."
Page 47
When the Lawrences stopped, I knew that the doubts of the old folks aboutbook-learning had conquered again, and so, toiling up the hill, and getting asfar into the cabin as possi- ble, I put Cicero "pro Archia Poeta"into the simplest En- glish with local applications, and usually convinced them-- for a week or so.
On Friday nights I often went home with some of thechildren, -- sometimes to Doc Burke's farm. He was a great, loud, thin Black,ever working, and trying to buy the seventy- five acres of hill and dale wherehe lived; but people said that he would surely fail, and the "white folkswould get it all." His wife was a magnificent Amazon, with saffron faceand shining hair, uncorseted and barefooted, and the children were strong andbeautiful. They lived in a one-and-a-half- room cabin in the hollow of thefarm, near the spring. The front room was full of great fat white beds,scrupulously neat; and there were bad chromos on the walls, and a tired centre-table. In the tiny back kitchen I was often invited to "take out andhelp" myself to fried chicken and wheat biscuit, "meat" and cornpone, string-beans and berries. At first I used to be a little alarmed at theapproach of bedtime in the one lone bedroom, but embarrassment was very deftlyavoided. First, all the children nodded and slept, and were stowed away in onegreat pile of goose feathers; next, the mother and the father discreetlyslipped away to the kitchen while I went to bed; then, blowing out the dimlight, they retired in the dark. In the morning all were up and away before Ithought of awaking. Across the road, where fat Reuben lived, they all wentoutdoors while the teacher retired, because they did not boast the luxury of akitchen.
I liked to stay with the Dowells, for they had four roomsand plenty of good country fare. Uncle Bird had a small, rough farm, all woodsand hills, miles from the big road; but he was full of tales, -- he preachednow and then, -- and with his children, berries, horses, and wheat he was happyand prosperous. Often, to keep the peace, I must go where life was less lovely;for instance, 'Tildy's mother was incorrigibly dirty, Reuben's larder waslimited seriously, and herds of untamed insects wandered over the Eddingses'beds. Best of all I loved to go to Josie's, and sit on the porch, eating
Page 48
peaches, while the mother bustled and talked: how Josie had bought thesewing-machine; how Josie worked at service in winter, but that four dollars amonth was "mighty little" wages; how Josie longed to go away toschool, but that it "looked like" they never could get far enoughahead to let her; how the crops failed and the well was yet unfinished; and,finally, how "mean" some of the white folks were.
For two summers I lived in this little world; it was dulland humdrum. The girls looked at the hill in wistful longing, and the boysfretted and haunted Alexandria. Alexandria was "town," -- astraggling, lazy village of houses, churches, and shops, and an aristocracy ofToms, Dicks, and Captains. Cuddled on the hill to the north was the village ofthe colored folks, who lived in three-or four-room unpainted cottages, someneat and homelike, and some dirty. The dwellings were scattered ratheraimlessly, but they centred about the twin temples of the hamlet, theMethodist, and the Hard-Shell Baptist churches. These, in turn, leaned gingerlyon a sad- colored schoolhouse. Hither my little world wended its crooked way onSunday to meet other worlds, and gossip, and wonder, and make the weeklysacrifice with frenzied priest at the altar of the "old-timereligion." Then the soft melody and mighty cadences of Negro songfluttered and thundered.
I have called my tiny community a world, and so itsisolation made it; and yet there was among us but a half- awakened commonconsciousness, sprung from common joy and grief, at burial, birth, or wedding;from a common hardship in poverty, poor land, and low wages; and, above all,from the sight of the Veil that hung between us and Opportunity. All thiscaused us to think some thoughts to- gether; but these, when ripe for speech,were spoken in various languages. Those whose eyes twenty-five and more yearsbefore had seen "the glory of the coming of the Lord," saw in everypresent hindrance or help a dark fatalism bound to bring all things right inHis own good time. The mass of those to whom slavery was a dim recollection ofchildhood found the world a puzzling thing: it asked little of them, and theyanswered with little, and yet it ridiculed their offering. Such a paradox theycould not understand, and therefore sank into listless indifference, orshiftlessness, or reckless bravado.
Page 49
There were, however, some -- such as Josie, Jim, and Ben -- to whom War, Hell,and Slavery were but childhood tales, whose young appetites had been whetted toan edge by school and story and half-awakened thought. Ill could they becontent, born without and beyond the World. And their weak wings beat againsttheir barriers, -- barriers of caste, of youth, of life; at last, in dangerousmoments, against everything that opposed even a whim.
The ten years that follow youth, the years when first therealization comes that life is leading somewhere, -- these were the years thatpassed after I left my little school. When they were past, I came by chanceonce more to the walls of Fisk University, to the halls of the chapel ofmelody. As I lingered there in the joy and pain of meeting old school-friends,there swept over me a sudden longing to pass again beyond the blue hill, and tosee the homes and the school of other days, and to learn how life had gone withmy school-children; and I went.
Josie was dead, and the gray-haired mother said simply,"We've had a heap of trouble since you've been away." I had fearedfor Jim. With a cultured parentage and a social caste to uphold him, he mighthave made a venturesome merchant or a West Point cadet. But here he was, angrywith life and reckless; and when Fanner Durham charged him with stealing wheat,the old man had to ride fast to escape the stones which the furious fool hurledafter him. They told Jim to run away; but he would not run, and the constablecame that afternoon. It grieved Josie, and great awkward John walked nine milesevery day to see his little brother through the bars of Lebanon jail. At lastthe two came back together in the dark night. The mother cooked supper, andJosie emptied her purse, and the boys stole away. Josie grew thin and silent,yet worked the more. The hill became steep for the quiet old father, and withthe boys away there was little to do in the valley. Josie helped them to sellthe old farm, and they moved nearer town. Brother Dennis, the carpenter, builta new house with six rooms; Josie toiled a year in Nashville, and brought backninety dollars to furnish the house and change it to a home.
Page 50
When the spring came, and the birds twittered, and thestream ran proud and full, little sister Lizzie, bold and thoughtless, flushedwith the passion of youth, bestowed herself on the tempter, and brought home anameless child. Josie shivered and worked on, with the vision of schooldays allfled, with a face wan and tired, -- worked until, on a summer's day, some onemarried another; then Josie crept to her mother like a hurt child, and slept --and sleeps.
I paused to scent the breeze as I entered the valley. TheLawrences have gone, -- father and son forever, -- and the other son lazilydigs in the earth to live. A new young widow rents out their cabin to fatReuben. Reuben is a Baptist preacher now, but I fear as lazy as ever, thoughhis cabin has three rooms; and little Ella has grown into a bouncing woman, andis ploughing corn on the hot hillside. There are babies a-plenty, and onehalf-witted girl. Across the valley is a house I did not know before, and thereI found, rocking one baby and expecting another, one of my schoolgirls, adaughter of Uncle Bird Dowell. She looked somewhat worried with her new duties,but soon bristled into pride over her neat cabin and the tale of her thriftyhusband, and the horse and cow, and the farm they were planning to buy.
My log schoolhouse was gone. In its place stood Progress;and Progress, I understand, is necessarily ugly. The crazy foundation stonesstill marked the former site of my poor little cabin, and not far away, on sixweary boulders, perched a jaunty board house, perhaps twenty by thirty feet,with three windows and a door that locked. Some of the window- glass wasbroken, and part of an old iron stove lay mournfully under the house. I peepedthrough the window half reverently, and found things that were more familiar.The blackboard had grown by about two feet, and the seats were still withoutbacks. The county owns the lot now, I hear, and every year there is a sessionof school. As I sat by the spring and looked on the Old and the New I feltglad, very glad, and yet --
After two long drinks I started on. There was the greatdouble log-house on the corner. I remembered the broken, blighted family thatused to live there. The strong, hard face of the mother, with its wilderness ofhair, rose before me. She had driven her husband away, and while I taughtschool a
Page 51
strange man lived there, big and jovial, and people talked. I felt sure thatBen and 'Tildy would come to naught from such a home. But this is an odd world;for Ben is a busy farmer in Smith County, "doing well, too," theysay, and he had cared for little 'Tildy until last spring, when a lover marriedher. A hard life the lad had led, toiling for meat, and laughed at because hewas homely and crooked. There was Sam Carlon, an impudent old skinflint, whohad definite notions about "niggers," and hired Ben a summer andwould not pay him. Then the hungry boy gathered his sacks together, and inbroad daylight went into Carlon's corn; and when the hard- fisted farmer setupon him, the angry boy flew at him like a beast. Doc Burke saved a murder anda lynching that day.
The story reminded me again of the Burkes, and animpatience seized me to know who won in the battle, Doc or the seventy-fiveacres. For it is a hard thing to make a farm out of nothing, even in fifteenyears. So I hurried on, thinking of the Burkes. They used to have a certainmagnificent barbarism about them that I liked. They were never vulgar, neverimmoral, but rather rough and primitive, with an unconventionality that spentitself in loud guffaws, slaps on the back, and naps in the corner. I hurried bythe cottage of the misborn Neill boys. It was empty, and they were grown intofat, lazy farm-hands. I saw the home of the Hickmans, but Albert, with hisstooping shoulders, had passed from the world. Then I came to the Burkes' gateand peered through; the enclosure looked rough and untrimmed, and yet therewere the same fences around the old farm save to the left, where lay twenty-five other acres. And lo! the cabin in the hollow had climbed the hill andswollen to a half-finished six-room cottage.
The Burkes held a hundred acres, but they were still indebt. Indeed, the gaunt father who toiled night and day would scarcely be happyout of debt, being so used to it. Some day he must stop, for his massive frameis showing decline. The mother wore shoes, but the lion-like physique of otherdays was broken. The children had grown up. Rob, the image of his father, wasloud and rough with laughter. Birdie, my school baby of six, had grown to apicture of maiden beauty, tall and tawny. "Edgar is gone," said themother, with head half bowed, -- "gone to work in Nashville; he and hisfather couldn't agree."
Page 52
Little Doc, the boy born since the time of my school, tookme horseback down the creek next morning toward Farmer Dowell's. The road andthe stream were battling for mastery, and the stream had the better of it. Wesplashed and waded, and the merry boy, perched behind me, chattered andlaughed. He showed me where Simon Thompson had bought a bit of ground and ahome; but his daughter Lana, a plump, brown, slow girl, was not there. She hadmarried a man and a farm twenty miles away. We wound on down the stream till wecame to a gate that I did not recognize, but the boy insisted that it was"Uncle Bird's." The farm was fat with the growing crop. In thatlittle valley was a strange stillness as I rode up; for death and marriage hadstolen youth and left age and childhood there. We sat and talked that nightafter the chores were done. Uncle Bird was grayer, and his eyes did not see sowell, but he was still jovial. We talked of the acres bought, -- one hundredand twenty-five, -- of the new guest- chamber added, of Martha's marrying. Thenwe talked of death: Fanny and Fred were gone; a shadow hung over the otherdaughter, and when it lifted she was to go to Nashville to school. At last wespoke of the neighbors, and as night fell, Uncle Bird told me how, on a nightlike that, 'Thenie came wandering back to her home over yonder, to escape theblows of her husband. And next morning she died in the home that her littlebow-legged brother, working and saving, had bought for their widowed mother.
My journey was done, and behind me lay hill and dale, andLife and Death. How shall man measure Progress there where the dark-faced Josielies? How many heartfuls of sorrow shall balance a bushel of wheat? How hard athing is life to the lowly, and yet how human and real! And all this life andlove and strife and failure, -- is it the twilight of nightfall or the flush ofsome faint-dawning day?
Thus sadly musing, I rode to Nashville in the Jim Crowcar.
Page 53
O black boy of Atlanta!
But half was spoken;
The slave's chains and the master's
Alike are broken;
The one curse of the races
Held both in tether;
They are rising -- all are rising --
The black and white together.
WHITTIER.
South of the North, yet north of the South, lies the Cityof a Hundred Hills, peering out from the shadows of the past into the promiseof the future. I have seen her in the morning, when the first flush of day hadhalf-roused her; she lay gray and still on the crimson soil of Georgia; thenthe blue smoke began to curl from her chimneys, the tinkle of bell and screamof whistle broke the silence, the rattle and roar of busy life slowly gatheredand swelled, until the seething whirl of the city seemed a strange thing in asleepy land.
Once, they say, even Atlanta slept dull and drowsy at thefoot-hills of the Alleghanies, until the iron baptism of war awakened her withits sullen waters, aroused and maddened her, and left her listening to the sea.And the sea cried to the hills and the hills answered the sea, till the cityrose like a widow and cast away her weeds, and toiled for her daily
Page 54
bread; toiled steadily, toiled cunningly, -- perhaps with some bitterness, witha touch, of reclame, -- and yet with real earnestness, and real sweat.
It is a hard thing to live haunted by the ghost of anuntrue dream; to see the wide vision of empire fade into real ashes and dirt;to feel the pang of the conquered, and yet know that with all the Bad that fellon one black day, something was vanquished that deserved to live, somethingkilled that in justice had not dared to die; to know that with the Right thattriumphed, triumphed something of Wrong, something sordid and mean, somethingless than the broadest and best. All this is bitter hard; and many a man andcity and people have found in it excuse for sulking, and brooding, and listlesswaiting.
Such are not men of the sturdier make; they of Atlantaturned resolutely toward the future; and that future held aloft vistas ofpurple and gold: -- Atlanta, Queen of the cotton kingdom; Atlanta, Gateway tothe Land of the Sun; Atlanta, the new Lachesis, spinner of web and woof for theworld. So the city crowned her hundred hills with factories, and stored hershops with cunning handiwork, and stretched long iron ways to greet the busyMercury in his coming. And the Nation talked of her striving.
Perhaps Atlanta was not christened for the winged maidenof dull Boeotia; you know the tale, -- how swarthy Atalanta, tall and wild,would marry only him who out-raced her; and how the wily Hippomenes laid threeapples of gold in the way. She fled like a shadow, paused, startled over thefirst apple, but even as he stretched his hand, fled again; hovered over thesecond, then, slipping from his hot grasp, flew over river, vale, and hill; butas she lingered over the third, his arms fell round her, and looking on eachother, the blazing passion of their love profaned the sanctuary of Love, andthey were cursed. If Atlanta be not named for Atalanta, she ought to have been.
Atalanta is not the first or the last maiden whom greedof gold has led to defile the temple of Love; and not maids alone, but men inthe race of life, sink from the high and generous ideals of youth to thegambler's code of the Bourse;
Page 55
and in all our Nation's striving is not the Gospel of Work befouled by theGospel of Pay? So common is this that one-half think it normal; sounquestioned, that we almost fear to question if the end of racing is not gold,if the aim of man is not rightly to be rich. And if this is the fault ofAmerica, how dire a danger lies before a new land and a new city, lest Atlanta,stooping for mere gold, shall find that gold accursed!
It was no maiden's idle whim that started this hardracing; a fearful wilderness lay about the feet of that city after the War, --feudalism, poverty, the rise of the Third Estate, serfdom, the re-birth of Lawand Order, and above and between all, the Veil of Race. How heavy a journey forweary feet! what wings must Atalanta have to flit over all this hollow andhill, through sour wood and sullen water, and by the red waste of sun-bakedclay! How fleet must Atalanta be if she will not be tempted by gold to profanethe Sanctuary!
The Sanctuary of our fathers has, to be sure, few Gods,-- some sneer, "all too few." There is the thrifty Mercury of NewEngland, Pluto of the North, and Ceres of the West; and there, too, is thehalf-forgotten Apollo of the South, under whose aegis the maiden ran, -- and asshe ran she forgot him, even as there in Boeotia Venus was forgot. She forgotthe old ideal of the Southern gentleman, -- that new-world heir of the graceand courtliness of patrician, knight, and noble; forgot his honor with hisfoibles, his kindliness with his carelessness, and stooped to apples of gold,-- to men busier and sharper, thriftier and more unscrupulous. Golden applesare beautiful -- I remember the lawless days of boyhood, when orchards incrimson and gold tempted me over fence and field -- and, too, the merchant whohas dethroned the planter is no despicable parvenu. Work and wealth arethe mighty levers to lift this old new land; thrift and toil and saving are thehighways to new hopes and new possibilities; and yet the warning is needed lestthe wily Hippomenes tempt Atalanta to thinking that golden apples are the goalof racing, and not mere incidents by the way.
Atlanta must not lead the South to dream of materialprosperity as the touchstone of all success; already the fatal might of thisidea is beginning to spread; it is replacing the finer type of Southerner withvulgar money-getters; it is
Page 56
burying the sweeter beauties of Southern life beneath pretence and ostentation.For every social ill the panacea of Wealth has been urged, -- wealth tooverthrow the remains of the slave feudalism; wealth to raise the"cracker" Third Estate; wealth to employ the black serfs, and theprospect of wealth to keep them working; wealth as the end and aim of politics,and as the legal tender for law and order; and, finally, instead of Truth,Beauty, and Goodness, wealth as the ideal of the Public School.
Not only is this true in the world which Atlantatypifies, but it is threatening to be true of a world beneath and beyond thatworld, -- the Black World beyond the Veil. Today it makes little difference toAtlanta, to the South, what the Negro thinks or dreams or wills. In thesoul-life of the land he is to-day, and naturally will long remain, unthoughtof, half forgotten; and yet when he does come to think and will and do forhimself, -- and let no man dream that day will never come, -- then the part heplays will not be one of sudden learning, but words and thoughts he has beentaught to lisp in his race-childhood. To-day the ferment of his striving towardself-realization is to the strife of the white world like a wheel within awheel: beyond the Veil are smaller but like problems of ideals, of leaders andthe led, of serfdom, of poverty, of order and subordination, and, through all,the Veil of Race. Few know of these problems, few who know notice them; and yetthere they are, awaiting student, artist, and seer, -- a field for somebodysometime to discover. Hither has the temptation of Hippomenes penetrated;already in this smaller world, which now indirectly and anon directly mustinfluence the larger for good or ill, the habit is forming of interpreting theworld in dollars. The old leaders of Negro opinion, in the little groups wherethere is a Negro social consciousness, are being replaced by new; neither theblack preacher nor the black teacher leads as he did two decades ago. Intotheir places are pushing the farmers and gardeners, the well-paid porters andartisans, the business-men, -- all those with property and money. And with allthis change, so curiously parallel to that of the Other-world, goes too thesame inevitable change in ideals. The South laments to-day the slow, steadydisappearance of a certain type of Negro,
Page 57
-- the faithful, courteous slave of other days, with his incor- ruptiblehonesty and dignified humility. He is passing away just as surely as the oldtype of Southern gentleman is passing, and from not dissimilar causes, -- thesudden transformation of a fair far-off ideal of Freedom into the hard realityof bread-winning and the consequent deification of Bread.
In the Black World, the Preacher and Teacher embodiedonce the ideals of this people -- the strife for another and a juster world,the vague dream of righteousness, the mystery of knowing; but to-day the dangeris that these ideals, with their simple beauty and weird inspiration, willsuddenly sink to a question of cash and a lust for gold. Here stands this blackyoung Atalanta, girding herself for the race that must be run; and if her eyesbe still toward the hills and sky as in the days of old, then we may look fornoble running; but what if some ruthless or wily or even thoughtless Hippomeneslay golden apples before her? What if the Negro people be wooed from a strifefor righteousness, from a love of know- ing, to regard dollars as the be-alland end-all of life? What if to the Mammonism of America be added the risingMammonism of the re-born South, and the Mammonism of this South be reinforcedby the budding Mammonism of its half- wakened black millions? Whither, then, isthe new-world quest of Goodness and Beauty and Truth gone glimmering? Mustthis, and that fair flower of Freedom which, despite the jeers of latter-daystriplings, sprung from our fathers' blood, must that too degenerate into adusty quest of gold, -- into lawless lust with Hippomenes?
The hundred hills of Atlanta are not all crowned withfactories. On one, toward the west, the setting sun throws three buildings inbold relief against the sky. The beauty of the group lies in its simple unity:-- a broad lawn of green rising from the red street and mingled roses andpeaches; north and south, two plain and stately halls; and in the midst, halfhidden in ivy, a larger building, boldly graceful, sparingly decorated, andwith one low spire. It is a restful group, -- one never looks for more; it isall here, all intelligible. There I live, and there I hear from day to day thelow hum of restful life. In winter's twilight, when the red sun glows, I
Page 58
can see the dark figures pass between the halls to the music of the night-bell.In the morning, when the sun is golden, the clang of the day-bell brings thehurry and laughter of three hundred young hearts from hall and street, and fromthe busy city below, -- children all dark and heavy-haired, -- to join theirclear young voices in the music of the morning sacrifice. In a half-dozenclass-rooms they gather then, -- here to follow the love-song of Dido, here tolisten to the tale of Troy divine; there to wander among the stars, there towander among men and nations, -- and elsewhere other well-worn ways of knowingthis queer world. Nothing new, no time-saving devices, -- simply oldtime-glorified methods of delving for Truth, and searching out the hiddenbeauties of life, and learning the good of living. The riddle of existence isthe college curriculum that was laid before the Pharaohs, that was taught inthe groves by Plato, that formed the trivium and quadrivium, andis to-day laid before the freedmen's sons by Atlanta University. And thiscourse of study will not change; its methods will grow more deft and effectual,its content richer by toil of scholar and sight of seer; but the true collegewill ever have one goal, -- not to earn meat, but to know the end and aim ofthat life which meat nourishes.
The vision of life that rises before these dark eyes hasin it nothing mean or selfish. Not at Oxford or at Leipsic, not at Yale orColumbia, is there an air of higher resolve or more unfettered striving; thedetermination to realize for men, both black and white, the broadestpossibilities of life, to seek the better and the best, to spread with theirown hands the Gospel of Sacrifice, -- all this is the burden of their talk anddream. Here, amid a wide desert of caste and proscription, amid theheart-hurting slights and jars and vagaries of a deep race- dislike, lies thisgreen oasis, where hot anger cools, and the bitterness of disappointment issweetened by the springs and breezes of Parnassus; and here men may lie andlisten, and learn of a future fuller than the past, and hear the voice of Time:
"Entbehren sollst du, sollst entbehren."
Page 59
They made their mistakes, those who planted Fisk andHoward and Atlanta before the smoke of battle had lifted; they made theirmistakes, but those mistakes were not the things at which we lately laughedsomewhat uproariously. They were right when they sought to found a neweducational system upon the University: where, forsooth, shall we groundknowledge save on the broadest and deepest knowledge? The roots of the tree,rather than the leaves, are the sources of its life; and from the dawn ofhistory, from Academus to Cambridge, the culture of the University has been thebroad foundation- stone on which is built the kindergarten's A B C.
But these builders did make a mistake in minimizing thegravity of the problem before them; in thinking it a matter of years anddecades; in therefore building quickly and laying their foundation carelessly,and lowering the standard of know- ing, until they had scattered haphazardthrough the South some dozen poorly equipped high schools and miscalled themuniversities. They forgot, too, just as their successors are forgetting, therule of inequality: -- that of the million black youth, some were fitted toknow and some to dig; that some had the talent and capacity of university men,and some the talent and capacity of blacksmiths; and that true training meantneither that all should be college men nor all artisans, but that the oneshould be made a missionary of culture to an untaught people, and the other afree workman among serfs. And to seek to make the blacksmith a scholar isalmost as silly as the more modern scheme of making the scholar a blacksmith;almost, but not quite.
The function of the university is not simply to teachbread- winning, or to furnish teachers for the public schools or to be a centreof polite society; it is, above all, to be the organ of that fine adjustmentbetween real life and the growing knowl- edge of life, an adjustment whichforms the secret of civilization. Such an institution the South of to-daysorely needs. She has religion, earnest, bigoted: -- religion that on bothsides the Veil often omits the sixth, seventh, and eighth commandments, butsubstitutes a dozen supplementary ones. She has, as Atlanta shows, growingthrift and love of toil; but she lacks that broad knowledge of what the worldknows and knew of human living and doing, which she may apply to the
Page 60
thousand problems of real life to-day confronting her. The need of the South isknowledge and culture, -- not in dainty limited quantity, as before the war,but in broad busy abundance in the world of work; and until she has this, notall the Apples of Hesperides, be they golden and bejewelled, can save her fromthe curse of the Boeotian lovers.
The Wings of Atalanta are the coming universities of theSouth. They alone can bear the maiden past the temptation of golden fruit. Theywill not guide her flying feet away from the cotton and gold; for -- ah,thoughtful Hippomenes! -- do not the apples lie in the very Way of Life? Butthey will guide her over and beyond them, and leave her kneeling in theSanctuary of Truth and Freedom and broad Humanity, virgin and undefiled. Sadlydid the Old South err in human education, despising the education of themasses, and niggardly in the support of colleges. Her ancient universityfoundations dwindled and withered under the foul breath of slavery; and evensince the war they have fought a failing fight for life in the tainted air ofsocial unrest and commercial selfishness, stunted by the death of criticism,and starving for lack of broadly cultured men. And if this is the white South'sneed and danger, how much heavier the danger and need of the freedmen's sons!how pressing here the need of broad ideals and true culture, the conservationof soul from sordid aims and petty passions! Let us build the Southernuniversity -- William and Mary, Trinity, Georgia, Texas, Tulane, Vanderbilt,and the others -- fit to live; let us build, too, the Negro universities: --Fisk, whose foundation was ever broad; Howard, at the heart of the Nation;Atlanta at Atlanta, whose ideal of scholarship has been held above thetemptation of numbers. Why not here, and perhaps elsewhere, plant deeply andfor all time centres of learning and living, colleges that yearly would sendinto the life of the South a few white men and a few black men of broadculture, catholic tolerance, and trained ability, joining their hands to otherhands, and giving to this squabble of the Races a decent and dignified peace?
Patience, Humility, Manners, and Taste, common schoolsand kindergartens, industrial and technical schools, literature and tolerance,-- all these spring from knowledge and culture,
Page 61
the children of the university. So must men and nations build, not otherwise,not upside down.
Teach workers to work, -- a wise saying; wise whenapplied to German boys and American girls; wiser when said of Negro boys, forthey have less knowledge of working and none to teach them. Teach thinkers tothink, -- a needed knowledge in a day of loose and careless logic; and theywhose lot is gravest must have the carefulest training to think aright. Ifthese things are so, how foolish to ask what is the best education for one orseven or sixty million souls! shall we teach them trades, or train them inliberal arts? Neither and both: teach the workers to work and the thinkers tothink; make carpenters of carpenters, and philosophers of philoso- phers, andfops of fools. Nor can we pause here. We are training not isolated men but aliving group of men, -- nay, a group within a group. And the final product ofour training must be neither a psychologist nor a brickmason, but a man. And tomake men, we must have ideals, broad, pure, and inspiring ends of living, --not sordid money-getting, not apples of gold. The worker must work for theglory of his handiwork, not simply for pay; the thinker must think for truth,not for fame. And all this is gained only by human strife and longing; byceaseless training and education; by founding Right on righteousness and Truthon the unham- pered search for Truth; by founding the common school on theuniversity, and the industrial school on the common school; and weaving thus asystem, not a distortion, and bringing a birth, not an abortion.
When night falls on the City of a Hundred Hills, a windgathers itself from the seas and comes murmuring westward. And at its bidding,the smoke of the drowsy factories sweeps down upon the mighty city and coversit like a pall, while yonder at the University the stars twinkle above StoneHall. And they say that yon gray mist is the tunic of Atalanta pausing over hergolden apples. Fly, my maiden, fly, for yonder comes Hippomenes!
Page 62
Why, if the Soul can fling the Dust aside,
And naked on the Air of Heaven ride,
Were't not a Shame -- were't not a Shame for him
In this clay carcase crippled to abide?
OMAR KHAYYAM (FITZGERALD).
From the shimmering swirl of waters where many, manythoughts ago the slave-ship first saw the square tower of Jamestown, haveflowed down to our day three streams of thinking: one swollen from the largerworld here and overseas, saying, the multiplying of human wants inculture-lands calls for the world-wide cooperation of men in satisfying them.Hence arises a new human unity, pulling the ends of earth nearer, and all men,black, yellow, and white. The larger humanity strives to feel in this contactof living Nations and sleeping hordes a thrill of new life in the world,crying, "If the contact of Life and Sleep be Death, shame on suchLife." To be sure, behind this thought lurks the afterthought of force anddominion, -- the making of brown men to delve when the temptation of beads andred calico cloys.
Page 63
The second thought streaming from the death-ship and thecurving river is the thought of the older South, -- the sincere and passionatebelief that somewhere between men and cattle, God created a tertiumquid, and called it a Negro, -- a clownish, simple creature, at times evenlovable within its limita- tions, but straitly foreordained to walk within theVeil. To be sure, behind the thought lurks the afterthought, -- some of themwith favoring chance might become men, but in sheer self-defence we dare notlet them, and we build about them walls so high, and hang between them and thelight a veil so thick, that they shall not even think of breaking through.
And last of all there trickles down that third and darkerthought, -- the thought of the things themselves, the confused, half-consciousmutter of men who are black and whitened, crying "Liberty, Freedom,Opportunity -- vouchsafe to us, O boastful World, the chance of livingmen!" To be sure, behind the thought lurks the afterthought, -- suppose,after all, the World is right and we are less than men? Suppose this madimpulse within is all wrong, some mock mirage from the untrue?
So here we stand among thoughts of human unity, eventhrough conquest and slavery; the inferiority of black men, even if forced byfraud; a shriek in the night for the freedom of men who themselves are not yetsure of their right to demand it. This is the tangle of thought andafterthought wherein we are called to solve the problem of training men forlife.
Behind all its curiousness, so attractive alike to sageand dilettante, lie its dim dangers, throwing across us shadows at oncegrotesque and awful. Plain it is to us that what the world seeks through desertand wild we have within our threshold, -- a stalwart laboring force, suited tothe semi-tropics; if, deaf to the voice of the Zeitgeist, we refuse to use anddevelop these men, we risk poverty and loss. If, on the other hand, seized bythe brutal afterthought, we debauch the race thus caught in our talons,selfishly sucking their blood and brains in the future as in the past, whatshall save us from national deca- dence? Only that saner selfishness, whichEducation teaches, can find the rights of all in the whirl of work.
Again, we may decry the color-prejudice of the South, yet
Page 64
it remains a heavy fact. Such curious kinks of the human mind exist and must bereckoned with soberly. They cannot be laughed away, nor always successfullystormed at, nor easily abolished by act of legislature. And yet they must notbe encouraged by being let alone. They must be recognized as facts, butunpleasant facts; things that stand in the way of civilization and religion andcommon decency. They can be met in but one way, -- by the breadth andbroadening of human reason, by catholicity of taste and culture. And so, too,the native ambition and aspiration of men, even though they be black, backward,and ungraceful, must not lightly be dealt with. To stimulate wildly weak anduntrained minds is to play with mighty fires; to flout their striving idly isto welcome a harvest of brutish crime and shameless lethargy in our very laps.The guiding of thought and the deft coordina- tion of deed is at once the pathof honor and humanity.
And so, in this great question of reconciling three vastand partially contradictory streams of thought, the one panacea of Educationleaps to the lips of all: -- such human training as will best use the labor ofall men without enslaving or brutalizing; such training as will give us poiseto encourage the prejudices that bulwark society, and to stamp out those thatin sheer barbarity deafen us to the wail of prisoned souls within the Veil, andthe mounting fury of shackled men.
But when we have vaguely said that Education will setthis tangle straight, what have we uttered but a truism? Training for lifeteaches living; but what training for the profitable living together of blackmen and white? A hundred and fifty years ago our task would have seemed easier.Then Dr. Johnson blandly assured us that education was needful solely for theembellishments of life, and was useless for ordinary vermin. To-day we haveclimbed to heights where we would open at least the outer courts of knowledgeto all, display its treasures to many, and select the few to whom its mysteryof Truth is revealed, not wholly by birth or the accidents of the stock market,but at least in part according to deftness and aim, talent and character. Thisprogramme, however, we are sorely puzzled in carrying out through that part ofthe land where the blight of slavery fell hardest, and where we are dealingwith two backward peoples. To make here in human
Page 65
education that ever necessary combination of the permanent and the contingent-- of the ideal and the practical in workable equilibrium -- has been there, asit ever must be in every age and place, a matter of infinite experiment andfrequent mistakes.
In rough approximation we may point out four varyingdecades of work in Southern education since the Civil War. From the close ofthe war until 1876, was the period of uncertain groping and temporary relief.There were army schools, mission schools, and schools of the Freedmen's Bureauin chaotic disarrangement seeking system and cooperation. Then followed tenyears of constructive definite effort toward the building of complete schoolsystems in the South. Normal schools and colleges were founded for thefreedmen, and teachers trained there to man the public schools. There was theinevitable tendency of war to underestimate the prejudices of the master andthe ignorance of the slave, and all seemed clear sailing out of the wreckage ofthe storm. Meantime, starting in this decade yet especially developing from1885 to 1895, began the industrial revolution of the South. The land sawglimpses of a new destiny and the stirring of new ideals. The educationalsystem striving to complete itself saw new obstacles and a field of work everbroader and deeper. The Negro colleges, hurriedly founded, were inadequatelyequipped, illogically distributed, and of varying efficiency and grade; thenormal and high schools were doing little more than common-school work, and thecommon schools were training but a third of the children who ought to be inthem, and training these too often poorly. At the same time the white South, byreason of its sudden conversion from the slavery ideal, by so much the morebecame set and strengthened in its racial prejudice, and crys- tallized it intoharsh law and harsher custom; while the mar- vellous pushing forward of thepoor white daily threatened to take even bread and butter from the mouths ofthe heavily handicapped sons of the freedmen. In the midst, then, of the largerproblem of Negro education sprang up the more practi- cal question of work, theinevitable economic quandary that faces a people in the transition from slaveryto freedom, and especially those who make that change amid hate and prejudice,lawlessness and ruthless competition.
Page 66
The industrial school springing to notice in this decade,but coming to full recognition in the decade beginning with 1895, was theproffered answer to this combined educational and economic crisis, and ananswer of singular wisdom and timeliness. From the very first in nearly all theschools some attention had been given to training in handiwork, but now wasthis training first raised to a dignity that brought it in direct touch withthe South's magnificent industrial development, and given an emphasis whichreminded black folk that before the Temple of Knowledge swing the Gates ofToil.
Yet after all they are but gates, and when turning oureyes from the temporary and the contingent in the Negro problem to the broaderquestion of the permanent uplifting and civilization of black men in America,we have a right to inquire, as this enthusiasm for material advancement mountsto its height, if after all the industrial school is the final and suffi- cientanswer in the training of the Negro race; and to ask gently, but in allsincerity, the ever-recurring query of the ages, Is not life more than meat,and the body more than raiment? And men ask this to-day all the more eagerlybecause of sinister signs in recent educational movements. The tendency ishere, born of slavery and quickened to renewed life by the crazy imperialism ofthe day, to regard human beings as among the material resources of a land to betrained with an eye single to future dividends. Race-prejudices, which keepbrown and black men in their "places," we are coming to regard asuseful allies with such a theory, no matter how much they may dull the ambitionand sicken the hearts of struggling human beings. And above all, we daily hearthat an education that encourages aspiration, that sets the loftiest of idealsand seeks as an end culture and character rather than bread-winning, is theprivilege of white men and the danger and delusion of black.
Especially has criticism been directed against the formereducational efforts to aid the Negro. In the four periods I have mentioned, wefind first, boundless, planless enthusiasm and sacrifice; then the preparationof teachers for a vast public-school system; then the launching and expansionof that school system amid increasing difficulties; and finally the training ofworkmen for the new and growing industries. This
Page 67
development has been sharply ridiculed as a logical anomaly and flat reversalof nature. Soothly we have been told that first industrial and manual trainingshould have taught the Negro to work, then simple schools should have taughthim to read and write, and finally, after years, high and normal schools couldhave completed the system, as intelligence and wealth demanded.
That a system logically so complete was historicallyimpossible, it needs but a little thought to prove. Progress in human affairsis more often a pull than a push, a surging forward of the exceptional man, andthe lifting of his duller brethren slowly and painfully to his vantage-ground.Thus it was no accident that gave birth to universities centuries before thecommon schools, that made fair Harvard the first flower of our wilderness. Soin the South: the mass of the freedmen at the end of the war lacked theintelligence so necessary to modern workingmen. They must first have the commonschool to teach them to read, write, and cipher; and they must have higherschools to teach teachers for the common schools. The white teachers whoflocked South went to establish such a common-school system. Few held the ideaof founding colleges; most of them at first would have laughed at the idea. Butthey faced, as all men since them have faced, that central paradox of theSouth, -- the social separation of the races. At that time it was the suddenvolcanic rupture of nearly all relations between black and white, in work andgovernment and family life. Since then a new adjustment of relations ineconomic and political affairs has grown up, -- an adjustment subtle anddifficult to grasp, yet singularly ingenious, which leaves still that frightfulchasm at the color-line across which men pass at their peril. Thus, then andnow, there stand in the South two separate worlds; and separate not simply inthe higher realms of social intercourse, but also in church and school, onrailway and street-car, in hotels and theatres, in streets and city sections,in books and newspapers, in asylums and jails, in hospitals and graveyards.There is still enough of contact for large economic and group cooperation, butthe separation is so thorough and deep that it absolutely precludes for thepresent between the races anything like that sympathetic and effectivegroup-training and leadership of the
Page 68
one by the other, such as the American Negro and all backward peoples must havefor effectual progress.
This the missionaries of '68 soon saw; and if effectiveindustrial and trade schools were impracticable before the establishment of acommon-school system, just as certainly no adequate common schools could befounded until there were teachers to teach them. Southern whites would notteach them; Northern whites in sufficient numbers could not be had. If theNegro was to learn, he must teach himself, and the most effective help thatcould be given him was the establishment of schools to train Negro teachers.This conclusion was slowly but surely reached by every student of the situationuntil simultaneously, in widely separated regions, without consultation orsystematic plan, there arose a series of institutions designed to furnishteachers for the untaught. Above the sneers of critics at the obvious defectsof this procedure must ever stand its one crushing rejoinder: in a singlegeneration they put thirty thousand black teachers in the South; they wiped outthe illiteracy of the majority of the black people of the land, and they madeTuskegee possible.
Such higher training-schools tended naturally to deepenbroader development: at first they were common and grammar schools, then somebecame high schools. And finally, by 1900, some thirty-four had one year ormore of studies of college grade. This development was reached with differentdegrees of speed in different institutions: Hampton is still a high school,while Fisk University started her college in 1871, and Spelman Seminary about1896. In all cases the aim was identical, -- to maintain the standards of thelower training by giving teachers and leaders the best practicable training;and above all, to furnish the black world with adequate standards of humanculture and lofty ideals of life. It was not enough that the teachers ofteachers should be trained in technical normal methods; they must also, so faras possible, be broad-minded, cultured men and women, to scatter civilizationamong a people whose ignorance was not simply of letters, but of life itself.
It can thus be seen that the work of education in theSouth began with higher institutions of training, which threw off as theirfoliage common schools, and later industrial schools,
Page 69
and at the same time strove to shoot their roots ever deeper toward college anduniversity training. That this was an inevitable and necessary development,sooner or later, goes without saying; but there has been, and still is, aquestion in many minds if the natural growth was not forced, and if the highertraining was not either overdone or done with cheap and unsound methods. Amongwhite Southerners this feeling is widespread and positive. A prominent Southernjournal voiced this in a recent editorial.
"The experiment that has been made to give thecolored students classical training has not been satisfactory. Even though manywere able to pursue the course, most of them did so in a parrot-like way,learning what was taught, but not seeming to appropriate the truth and importof their instruction, and graduating without sensible aim or valuable oc-cupation for their future. The whole scheme has proved a waste of time,efforts, and the money of the state."
While most fair-minded men would recognize this asextreme and overdrawn, still without doubt many are asking, Are there asufficient number of Negroes ready for college training to warrant theundertaking? Are not too many students prematurely forced into this work? Doesit not have the effect of dissatisfying the young Negro with his environment?And do these graduates succeed in real life? Such natural questions cannot beevaded, nor on the other hand must a Nation naturally skeptical as to Negroability assume an unfavorable answer without careful inquiry and patientopenness to conviction. We must not forget that most Americans answer allqueries regarding the Negro a priori, and that the least that humancourtesy can do is to listen to evidence.
The advocates of the higher education of the Negro wouldbe the last to deny the incompleteness and glaring defects of the presentsystem: too many institutions have attempted to do college work, the work insome cases has not been thoroughly done, and quantity rather than quality hassometimes been sought. But all this can be said of higher education throughoutthe land; it is the almost inevitable incident of educational growth, andleaves the deeper question of the legitimate demand for the higher training ofNegroes untouched. And this latter question can be settled in but one
Page 70
way, -- by a first-hand study of the facts. If we leave out of view allinstitutions which have not actually graduated students from a course higherthan that of a New England high school, even though they be called colleges; ifthen we take the thirty-four remaining institutions, we may clear up manymisapprehensions by asking searchingly, What kind of institutions are they?what do they teach? and what sort of men do they graduate?
And first we may say that this type of college, includingAtlanta, Fisk, and Howard, Wilberforce and Claflin, Shaw, and the rest, ispeculiar, almost unique. Through the shining trees that whisper before me as Iwrite, I catch glimpses of a boulder of New England granite, covering a grave,which graduates of Atlanta University have placed there, --
"GRATEFUL MEMORY OF THEIR FORMER TEACHER
AND FRIEND AND OF THE UNSELFISH LIFE HE LIVED,
AND THE NOBLE WORK HE WROUGHT; THAT THEY,
THEIR CHILDREN, AND THEIR CHILDREN'S CHILDREN
MIGHT BE BLESSED."
This was the gift of New England to the freed Negro: notalms, but a friend; not cash, but character. It was not and is not money theseseething millions want, but love and sympathy, the pulse of hearts beating withred blood; -- a gift which to-day only their own kindred and race can bring tothe masses, but which once saintly souls brought to their favored children inthe crusade of the sixties, that finest thing in American history, and one ofthe few things untainted by sordid greed and cheap vainglory. The teachers inthese institutions came not to keep the Negroes in their place, but to raisethem out of the defilement of the places where slavery had wallowed them. Thecolleges they founded were social settlements; homes where the best of the sonsof the freedmen came in close and sympathetic touch with the best traditions ofNew England. They lived and ate together, studied and worked, hoped andharkened in the dawning light. In actual formal content their curriculum wasdoubtless old-fashioned, but in educational power it was supreme, for it wasthe contact of living souls.
Page 71
From such schools about two thousand Negroes have goneforth with the bachelor's degree. The number in itself is enough to put at restthe argument that too large a proportion of Negroes are receiving highertraining. If the ratio to population of all Negro students throughout the land,in both college and secondary training, be counted, Commissioner Harris assuresus "it must be increased to five times its present average" to equalthe average of the land.
Fifty years ago the ability of Negro students in anyappre- ciable numbers to master a modern college course would have beendifficult to prove. To-day it is proved by the fact that four hundred Negroes,many of whom have been reported as brilliant students, have received thebachelor's degree from Harvard, Yale, Oberlin, and seventy other leadingcolleges. Here we have, then, nearly twenty-five hundred Negro graduates, ofwhom the crucial query must be made, How far did their training fit them forlife? It is of course extremely difficult to collect satisfactory data on sucha point, -- difficult to reach the men, to get trustworthy testimony, and togauge that testimony by any generally acceptable criterion of success. In 1900,the Conference at Atlanta University undertook to study these graduates, andpublished the results. First they sought to know what these graduates weredoing, and succeeded in getting answers from nearly two-thirds of the liv- ing.The direct testimony was in almost all cases corroborated by the reports of thecolleges where they graduated, so that in the main the reports were worthy ofcredence. Fifty-three per cent of these graduates were teachers, -- presidentsof institutions, heads of normal schools, principals of city school- systems,and the like. Seventeen per cent were clergymen; another seventeen per centwere in the professions, chiefly as physicians. Over six per cent weremerchants, farmers, and artisans, and four per cent were in the governmentcivil- service. Granting even that a considerable proportion of the thirdunheard from are unsuccessful, this is a record of usefulness. Personally Iknow many hundreds of these graduates, and have corresponded with more than athousand; through others I have followed carefully the life-work of scores; Ihave taught some of them and some of the pupils whom they have taught, lived inhomes which they have builded, and
Page 72
looked at life through their eyes. Comparing them as a class with my fellowstudents in New England and in Europe, I cannot hesitate in saying that nowherehave I met men and women with a broader spirit of helpfulness, with deeperdevotion to their life-work, or with more consecrated determination to succeedin the face of bitter difficulties than among Negro college-bred men. Theyhave, to be sure, their proportion of ne'er-do-wells, their pedants andlettered fools, but they have a surprisingly small proportion of them; theyhave not that culture of manner which we instinctively associate withuniversity men, forgetting that in reality it is the heritage from culturedhomes, and that no people a generation removed from slavery can escape acertain unpleasant rawness and gaucherie, despite the best of training.
With all their larger vision and deeper sensibility,these men have usually been conservative, careful leaders. They have seldombeen agitators, have withstood the temptation to head the mob, and have workedsteadily and faithfully in a thousand communities in the South. As teachers,they have given the South a commendable system of city schools and largenumbers of private normal-schools and academies. Colored college-bred men haveworked side by side with white college graduates at Hampton; almost from thebeginning the backbone of Tuskegee's teaching force has been formed ofgraduates from Fisk and Atlanta. And to-day the institute is filled withcollege graduates, from the energetic wife of the principal down to the teacherof agriculture, including nearly half of the executive council and a majorityof the heads of departments. In the professions, college men are slowly butsurely leavening the Negro church, are healing and preventing the devastationsof disease, and beginning to furnish legal protection for the liberty andproperty of the toiling masses. All this is needful work. Who would do it ifNegroes did not? How could Negroes do it if they were not trained carefully forit? If white people need colleges to furnish teachers, minis- ters, lawyers,and doctors, do black people need nothing of the sort?
If it is true that there are an appreciable number ofNegro youth in the land capable by character and talent to receive that highertraining, the end of which is culture, and if the
Page 73
two and a half thousand who have had something of this training in the pasthave in the main proved themselves useful to their race and generation, thequestion then comes, What place in the future development of the South oughtthe Negro college and college-bred man to occupy? That the present socialseparation and acute race-sensitiveness must eventually yield to the influencesof culture, as the South grows civilized, is clear. But such transformationcalls for singular wisdom and patience. If, while the healing of this vast soreis progressing, the races are to live for many years side by side, united ineconomic effort, obeying a common government, sensitive to mutual thought andfeeling, yet subtly and silently separate in many matters of deeper humanintimacy, -- if this unusual and dangerous development is to progress amidpeace and order, mutual respect and growing intelligence, it will call forsocial surgery at once the delicatest and nicest in modern history. It willdemand broad-minded, upright men, both white and black, and in its finalaccomplishment American civilization will triumph. So far as white men are con-cerned, this fact is to-day being recognized in the South, and a happyrenaissance of university education seems imminent. But the very voices thatcry hail to this good work are, strange to relate, largely silent orantagonistic to the higher education of the Negro.
Strange to relate! for this is certain, no securecivilization can be built in the South with the Negro as an ignorant, turbulentproletariat. Suppose we seek to remedy this by making them laborers and nothingmore: they are not fools, they have tasted of the Tree of Life, and they willnot cease to think, will not cease attempting to read the riddle of the world.By taking away their best equipped teachers and leaders, by slamming the doorof opportunity in the faces of their bolder and brighter minds, will you makethem satisfied with their lot? or will you not rather transfer their leadingfrom the hands of men taught to think to the hands of untrained demagogues? Weought not to forget that despite the pressure of poverty, and despite theactive discouragement and even ridicule of friends, the demand for highertraining steadily increases among Negro youth: there were, in the years from1875 to 1880, 22 Negro graduates from Northern colleges;
Page 74
from 1885 to 1890 there were 43, and from 1895 to 1900, nearly 100 graduates.From Southern Negro colleges there were, in the same three periods, 143, 413,and over 500 graduates. Here, then, is the plain thirst for training; byrefusing to give this Talented Tenth the key to knowledge, can any sane manimagine that they will lightly lay aside their yearning and contentedly becomehewers of wood and drawers of water?
No. The dangerously clear logic of the Negro's positionwill more and more loudly assert itself in that day when increasing wealth andmore intricate social organization preclude the South from being, as it solargely is, simply an armed camp for intimidating black folk. Such waste ofenergy cannot he spared if the South is to catch up with civilization. And asthe black third of the land grows in thrift and skill, unless skilfully guidedin its larger philosophy, it must more and more brood over the red past and thecreeping, crooked present, until it grasps a gospel of revolt and revenge andthrows its new-found energies athwart the current of advance. Even to-day themasses of the Negroes see all too clearly the anomalies of their position andthe moral crookedness of yours. You may marshal strong indictments againstthem, but their counter-cries, lacking though they be in formal logic, haveburning truths within them which you may not wholly ignore, O SouthernGentlemen! If you deplore their presence here, they ask, Who brought us? Whenyou cry, Deliver us from the vision of intermarriage, they answer that legalmarriage is infinitely better than systematic concubinage and prostitution. Andif in just fury you accuse their vagabonds of violating women, they also infury quite as just may reply: The rape which your gentlemen have done againsthelpless black women in defiance of your own laws is written on the foreheadsof two millions of mulattoes, and written in ineffaceable blood. And finally,when you fasten crime upon this race as its peculiar trait, they answer thatslavery was the arch-crime, and lynching and lawlessness its twin abortions;that color and race are not crimes, and yet it is they which in this landreceive most unceasing condemnation, North, East, South, and West.
I will not say such arguments are wholly justified, -- Iwill
Page 75
not insist that there is no other side to the shield; but I do say that of thenine millions of Negroes in this nation, there is scarcely one out of thecradle to whom these arguments do not daily present themselves in the guise ofterrible truth. I insist that the question of the future is how best to keepthese millions from brooding over the wrongs of the past and the difficultiesof the present, so that all their energies may be bent toward a cheerfulstriving and cooperation with their white neighbors toward a larger, juster,and fuller future. That one wise method of doing this lies in the closerknitting of the Negro to the great industrial possibilities of the South is agreat truth. And this the common schools and the manual training and tradeschools are working to accomplish. But these alone are not enough. Thefoundations of knowledge in this race, as in others, must be sunk deep in thecollege and university if we would build a solid, permanent structure. Internalproblems of social advance must inevitably come, -- problems of work and wages,of families and homes, of morals and the true valuing of the things of life;and all these and other inevitable problems of civilization the Negro must meetand solve largely for himself, by reason of his isolation; and can there be anypossible solution other than by study and thought and an appeal to the richexperience of the past? Is there not, with such a group and in such a crisis,infinitely more danger to be apprehended from half-trained minds and shallowthinking than from over-education and over-refinement? Surely we have witenough to found a Negro college so manned and equipped as to steer successfullybetween the dilettante and the fool. We shall hardly induce black men tobelieve that if their stomachs be full, it matters little about their brains.They already dimly perceive that the paths of peace winding between honest toiland dignified manhood call for the guidance of skilled thinkers, the loving,reverent comradeship between the black lowly and the black men emancipated bytraining and culture.
The function of the Negro college, then, is clear: itmust maintain the standards of popular education, it must seek the socialregeneration of the Negro, and it must help in the solution of problems of racecontact and cooperation. And finally, beyond all this, it must develop men.Above our
Page 76
modern socialism, and out of the worship of the mass, must persist and evolvethat higher individualism which the centres of culture protect; there must comea loftier respect for the sovereign human soul that seeks to know itself andthe world about it; that seeks a freedom for expansion and self- development;that will love and hate and labor in its own way, untrammeled alike by old andnew. Such souls aforetime have inspired and guided worlds, and if we be notwholly bewitched by our Rhinegold, they shall again. Herein the longing ofblack men must have respect: the rich and bitter depth of their experience, theunknown treasures of their inner life, the strange rendings of nature they haveseen, may give the world new points of view and make their loving, living, anddoing precious to all human hearts. And to themselves in these the days thattry their souls, the chance to soar in the dim blue air above the smoke is totheir finer spirits boon and guerdon for what they lose on earth by beingblack.
I sit with Shakespeare and he winces not. Across thecolor line I move arm in arm with Balzac and Dumas, where smiling men andwelcoming women glide in gilded halls. From out the caves of evening that swingbetween the strong- limbed earth and the tracery of the stars, I summonAristotle and Aurelius and what soul I will, and they come all graciously withno scorn nor condescension. So, wed with Truth, I dwell above the Veil. Is thisthe life you grudge us, O knightly America? Is this the life you long to changeinto the dull red hideousness of Georgia? Are you so afraid lest peering fromthis high Pisgah, between Philistine and Amalekite, we sight the Promised Land?
Page 77
I am black but comely, O ye daughters of Jerusalem,
As the tents of Kedar, as the curtains of Solomon.
Look not upon me, because I am black,
Because the sun hath looked upon me:
My mother's children were angry with me;
They made me the keeper of the vineyards;
But mine own vineyard have I not kept.
THE SONG OF SOLOMON.
Out of the North the train thundered, and we woke to seethe crimson soil of Georgia stretching away bare and monotonous right and left.Here and there lay straggling, unlovely vil- lages, and lean men loafedleisurely at the depots; then again came the stretch of pines and clay. Yet wedid not nod, nor weary of the scene; for this is historic ground. Right acrossour track, three hundred and sixty years ago, wandered the
Page 78
cavalcade of Hernando de Soto, looking for gold and the Great Sea; and he andhis foot-sore captives disappeared yonder in the grim forests to the west. Heresits Atlanta, the city of a hundred hills, with something Western, somethingSouthern, and something quite its own, in its busy life. Just this side Atlantais the land of the Cherokees and to the southwest, not far from where Sam Hosewas crucified, you may stand on a spot which is to-day the centre of the Negroproblem, -- the centre of those nine million men who are America's darkheritage from slavery and the slave-trade.
Not only is Georgia thus the geographical focus of ourNegro population, but in many other respects, both now and yesterday, the Negroproblems have seemed to be centered in this State. No other State in the Unioncan count a million Negroes among its citizens, -- a population as large as theslave population of the whole Union in 1800; no other State fought so long andstrenuously to gather this host of Africans. Oglethorpe thought slavery againstlaw and gospel; but the circumstances which gave Georgia its first inhabitantswere not calculated to furnish citizens over-nice in their ideas about rum andslaves. Despite the prohibitions of the trustees, these Georgians, like some oftheir descendants, proceeded to take the law into their own hands; and sopliant were the judges, and so flagrant the smuggling, and so earnest were theprayers of Whitefield, that by the middle of the eighteenth century allrestrictions were swept away, and the slave-trade went merrily on for fiftyyears and more.
Down in Darien, where the Delegal riots took place somesummers ago, there used to come a strong protest against slavery from theScotch Highlanders; and the Moravians of Ebenezer did not like the system. Butnot till the Haytian Terror of Toussaint was the trade in men even checked;while the national statute of 1808 did not suffice to stop it. How the Africanspoured in! -- fifty thousand between 1790 and 1810, and then, from Virginia andfrom smugglers, two thousand a year for many years more. So the thirty thousandNegroes of Georgia in 1790 doubled in a decade, -- were over a hundred thousandin 1810, had reached two hundred thousand in 1820, and half a million at thetime of the war. Thus like a snake the black population writhed upward.
Page 79
But we must hasten on our journey. This that we pass as wenear Atlanta is the ancient land of the Cherokees, -- that brave Indian nationwhich strove so long for its fatherland, until Fate and the United StatesGovernment drove them beyond the Mississippi. If you wish to ride with me youmust come into the "Jim Crow Car." There will be no objection, --already four other white men, and a little white girl with her nurse, are inthere. Usually the races are mixed in there; but the white coach is all white.Of course this car is not so good as the other, but it is fairly clean andcomfortable. The discomfort lies chiefly in the hearts of those four black menyonder -- and in mine.
We rumble south in quite a business-like way. The barered clay and pines of Northern Georgia begin to disappear, and in their placeappears a rich rolling land, luxuriant, and here and there well tilled. This isthe land of the Creek Indians; and a hard time the Georgians had to seize it.The towns grow more frequent and more interesting, and brand-new cotton millsrise on every side. Below Macon the world grows darker; for now we approach theBlack Belt, -- that strange land of shadows, at which even slaves paled in thepast, and whence come now only faint and half-intelligible murmurs to the worldbeyond. The "Jim Crow Car" grows larger and a shade better; threerough field-hands and two or three white loafers accompany us, and the newsboystill spreads his wares at one end. The sun is setting, but we can see thegreat cotton country as we enter it, -- the soil now dark and fertile, now thinand gray, with fruit-trees and dilapidated buildings, -- all the way to Albany.
At Albany, in the heart of the Black Belt, we stop. Twohundred miles south of Atlanta, two hundred miles west of the Atlantic, and onehundred miles north of the Great Gulf lies Dougherty County, with ten thousandNegroes and two thousand whites. The Flint River winds down from Andersonville,and, turning suddenly at Albany, the county-seat, hurries on to join theChattahoochee and the sea. Andrew Jackson knew the Flint well, and marchedacross it once to avenge the Indian Massacre at Fort Mims. That was in 1814,not long before the battle of New Orleans; and by the Creek treaty thatfollowed this campaign, all Dougherty County, and much
Page 80
other rich land, was ceded to Georgia. Still, settlers fought shy of this land,for the Indians were all about, and they were unpleasant neighbors in thosedays. The panic of 1837, which Jackson bequeathed to Van Buren, turned theplanters from the impoverished lands of Virginia, the Carolinas, and eastGeorgia, toward the West. The Indians were removed to Indian Territory, andsettlers poured into these coveted lands to retrieve their broken fortunes. Fora radius of a hundred miles about Albany, stretched a great fertile land,luxuriant with forests of pine, oak, ash, hickory, and poplar; hot with the sunand damp with the rich black swamp-land; and here the corner-stone of theCotton Kingdom was laid.
Albany is to-day a wide-streeted, placid, Southern town,with a broad sweep of stores and saloons, and flanking rows of homes, -- whitesusually to the north, and blacks to the south. Six days in the week the townlooks decidedly too small for itself, and takes frequent and prolonged naps.But on Saturday suddenly the whole county disgorges itself upon the place, anda perfect flood of black peasantry pours through the streets, fills the stores,blocks the sidewalks, chokes the thoroughfares, and takes full possession ofthe town. They are black, sturdy, uncouth country folk, good- natured andsimple, talkative to a degree, and yet far more silent and brooding than thecrowds of the Rhine-pfalz, or Naples, or Cracow. They drink considerablequantities of whiskey, but do not get very drunk; they talk and laugh loudly attimes, but seldom quarrel or fight. They walk up and down the streets, meet andgossip with friends, stare at the shop windows, buy coffee, cheap candy, andclothes, and at dusk drive home -- happy? well no, not exactly happy, but muchhappier than as though they had not come.
Thus Albany is a real capital, -- a typical Southerncounty town, the centre of the life of ten thousand souls; their point ofcontact with the outer world, their centre of news and gossip, their market forbuying and selling, borrowing and lending, their fountain of justice and law.Once upon a time we knew country life so well and city life so little, that weillustrated city life as that of a closely crowded country district. Now theworld has well-nigh forgotten what the country is, and we must imagine a littlecity of black people
Page 81
scattered far and wide over three hundred lonesome square miles of land,without train or trolley, in the midst of cotton and corn, and wide patches ofsand and gloomy soil.
It gets pretty hot in Southern Georgia in July, -- a sortof dull, determined heat that seems quite independent of the sun; so it took ussome days to muster courage enough to leave the porch and venture out on thelong country roads, that we might see this unknown world. Finally we started.It was about ten in the morning, bright with a faint breeze, and we joggedleisurely southward in the valley of the Flint. We passed the scatteredbox-like cabins of the brickyard hands, and the long tenement-row facetiouslycalled "The Ark," and were soon in the open country, and on theconfines of the great plantations of other days. There is the "Joe Fieldsplace"; a rough old fellow was he, and had killed many a"nigger" in his day. Twelve miles his plantation used to run, -- aregular barony. It is nearly all gone now; only strag- gling bits belong to thefamily, and the rest has passed to Jews and Negroes. Even the bits which areleft are heavily mortgaged, and, like the rest of the land, tilled by tenants.Here is one of them now, -- a tall brown man, a hard worker and a hard drinker,illiterate, but versed in farmlore, as his nodding crops declare. Thisdistressingly new board house is his, and he has just moved out of yondermoss-grown cabin with its one square room.
From the curtains in Benton's house, down the road, adark comely face is staring at the strangers; for passing carriages are notevery-day occurrences here. Benton is an intelligent yellow man with agood-sized family, and manages a plantation blasted by the war and now thebroken staff of the widow. He might be well-to-do, they say; but he carousestoo much in Albany. And the half-desolate spirit of neglect born of the verysoil seems to have settled on these acres. In times past there were cotton-ginsand machinery here; but they have rotted away.
The whole land seems forlorn and forsaken. Here are theremnants of the vast plantations of the Sheldons, the Pellots, and the Rensons;but the souls of them are passed. The houses lie in half ruin, or have whollydisappeared; the fences have flown, and the families are wandering in theworld.
Page 82
Strange vicissitudes have met these whilom masters. Yonder stretch the wideacres of Bildad Reasor; he died in war-time, but the upstart overseer hastenedto wed the widow. Then he went, and his neighbors too, and now only the blacktenant remains; but the shadow-hand of the master's grand-nephew or cousin orcreditor stretches out of the gray distance to collect the rack-rentremorselessly, and so the land is uncared-for and poor. Only black tenants canstand such a system, and they only because they must. Ten miles we have riddento-day and have seen no white face.
A resistless feeling of depression falls slowly upon us,despite the gaudy sunshine and the green cottonfields. This, then, is theCotton Kingdom, -- the shadow of a marvellous dream. And where is the King?Perhaps this is he, -- the sweating ploughman, tilling his eighty acres withtwo lean mules, and fighting a hard battle with debt. So we sit musing, until,as we turn a corner on the sandy road, there comes a fairer scene suddenly inview, -- a neat cottage snugly ensconced by the road, and near it a littlestore. A tall bronzed man rises from the porch as we hail him, and comes out toour carriage. He is six feet in height, with a sober face that smiles gravely.He walks too straight to be a tenant, -- yes, he owns two hundred and fortyacres. "The land is run down since the boom-days of eighteen hundred andfifty," he explains, and cotton is low. Three black tenants live on hisplace, and in his little store he keeps a small stock of tobacco, snuff, soap,and soda, for the neighborhood. Here is his gin-house with new machinery justinstalled. Three hundred bales of cotton went through it last year. Twochildren he has sent away to school. Yes, he says sadly, he is getting on, butcotton is down to four cents; I know how Debt sits staring at him.
Wherever the King may be, the parks and palaces of theCotton Kingdom have not wholly disappeared. We plunge even now into greatgroves of oak and towering pine, with an undergrowth of myrtle and shrubbery.This was the "home- house" of the Thompsons, -- slave-barons whodrove their coach and four in the merry past. All is silence now, and ashes,and tangled weeds. The owner put his whole fortune into the rising cottonindustry of the fifties, and with the
Page 83
falling prices of the eighties he packed up and stole away. Yonder is anothergrove, with unkempt lawn, great magnolias, and grass-grown paths. The Big Housestands in half- ruin, its great front door staring blankly at the street, andthe back part grotesquely restored for its black tenant. A shabby, well-builtNegro he is, unlucky and irresolute. He digs hard to pay rent to the white girlwho owns the remnant of the place. She married a policeman, and lives inSavannah.
Now and again we come to churches. Here is one now, --Shepherd's, they call it, -- a great whitewashed barn of a thing, perched onstilts of stone, and looking for all the world as though it were just restinghere a moment and might be expected to waddle off down the road at almost anytime. And yet it is the centre of a hundred cabin homes; and sometimes, of aSunday, five hundred persons from far and near gather here and talk and eat andsing. There is a school- house near, -- a very airy, empty shed; but even thisis an improvement, for usually the school is held in the church. The churchesvary from log-huts to those like Shepherd's, and the schools from nothing tothis little house that sits demurely on the county line. It is a tinyplank-house, perhaps ten by twenty, and has within a double row of roughunplaned benches, resting mostly on legs, sometimes on boxes. Opposite the dooris a square home-made desk. In one corner are the ruins of a stove, and in theother a dim blackboard. It is the cheerfulest schoolhouse I have seen inDougherty, save in town. Back of the schoolhouse is a lodgehouse two storieshigh and not quite finished. Societies meet there, -- societies "to carefor the sick and bury the dead"; and these societies grow and flourish.
We had come to the boundaries of Dougherty, and wereabout to turn west along the county-line, when all these sights were pointedout to us by a kindly old man, black, white- haired, and seventy. Forty-fiveyears he had lived here, and now supports himself and his old wife by the helpof the steer tethered yonder and the charity of his black neighbors. He showsus the farm of the Hills just across the county line in Baker, -- a widow andtwo strapping sons, who raised ten bales (one need not add "cotton"down here) last year. There are fences and pigs and cows, and the soft-voiced,velvet-
Page 84
skinned young Memnon, who sauntered half-bashfully over to greet the strangers,is proud of his home. We turn now to the west along the county line. Greatdismantled trunks of pines tower above the green cottonfields, cracking theirna- ked gnarled fingers toward the border of living forest beyond. There islittle beauty in this region, only a sort of crude abandon that suggests power,-- a naked grandeur, as it were. The houses are bare and straight; there are nohammocks or easy-chairs, and few flowers. So when, as here at Rawdon's, onesees a vine clinging to a little porch, and home-like windows peeping over thefences, one takes a long breath. I think I never before quite realized theplace of the Fence in civilization. This is the Land of the Unfenced, wherecrouch on either hand scores of ugly one-room cabins, cheerless and dirty. Herelies the Negro problem in its naked dirt and penury. And here are no fences.But now and then the crisscross rails or straight palings break into view, andthen we know a touch of culture is near. Of course Harrison Gohagen, -- a quietyellow man, young, smooth-faced, and diligent, -- of course he is lord of somehundred acres, and we expect to see a vision of well-kept rooms and fat bedsand laughing children. For has he not fine fences? And those over yonder, whyshould they build fences on the rack-rented land? It will only increase theirrent.
On we wind, through sand and pines and glimpses of oldplantations, till there creeps into sight a cluster of buildings, -- wood andbrick, mills and houses, and scattered cabins. It seemed quite a village. As itcame nearer and nearer, however, the aspect changed: the buildings were rotten,the bricks were falling out, the mills were silent, and the store was closed.Only in the cabins appeared now and then a bit of lazy life. I could imaginethe place under some weird spell, and was half-minded to search out theprincess. An old ragged black man, honest, simple, and improvident, told us thetale. The Wizard of the North -- the Capitalist -- had rushed down in theseventies to woo this coy dark soil. He bought a square mile or more, and for atime the field-hands sang, the gins groaned, and the mills buzzed. Then came achange. The agent's son embezzled the funds and ran off with them. Then theagent himself disappeared. Finally the new agent stole
Page 85
even the books, and the company in wrath closed its business and its houses,refused to sell, and let houses and furniture and machinery rust and rot. Sothe Waters-Loring plantation was stilled by the spell of dishonesty, and standslike some gaunt rebuke to a scarred land.
Somehow that plantation ended our day's journey; for Icould not shake off the influence of that silent scene. Back toward town weglided, past the straight and thread-like pines, past a dark tree-dotted pondwhere the air was heavy with a dead sweet perfume. White slender-legged curlewsflitted by us, and the garnet blooms of the cotton looked gay against the greenand purple stalks. A peasant girl was hoeing in the field, white-turbaned andblack-limbed. All this we saw, but the spell still lay upon us.
How curious a land is this, -- how full of untold story,of tragedy and laughter, and the rich legacy of human life; shadowed with atragic past, and big with future promise! This is the Black Belt of Georgia.Dougherty County is the west end of the Black Belt, and men once called it theEgypt of the Confederacy. It is full of historic interest. First there is theSwamp, to the west, where the Chickasawhatchee flows sullenly southward. Theshadow of an old plantation lies at its edge, forlorn and dark. Then comes thepool; pendent gray moss and brackish waters appear, and forests filled withwildfowl. In one place the wood is on fire, smouldering in dull red anger; butnobody minds. Then the swamp grows beautiful; a raised road, built by chainedNegro convicts, dips down into it, and forms a way walled and almost covered inliving green. Spreading trees spring from a prodigal luxuri- ance ofundergrowth; great dark green shadows fade into the black background, until allis one mass of tangled semi- tropical foliage, marvellous in its weird savagesplendor. Once we crossed a black silent stream, where the sad trees andwrithing creepers, all glinting fiery yellow and green, seemed like some vastcathedral, -- some green Milan builded of wildwood. And as I crossed, I seemedto see again that fierce tragedy of seventy years ago. Osceola, the Indian-Negro chieftain, had risen in the swamps of Florida, vowing vengeance. Hiswar-cry reached the red Creeks of Dougherty, and their war-cry rang from theChattahoochee to the sea.
Page 86
Men and women and children fled and fell before them as they swept intoDougherty. In yonder shadows a dark and hideously painted warrior glidedstealthily on, -- another and another, until three hundred had crept into thetreacherous swamp. Then the false slime closing about them called the white menfrom the east. Waist-deep, they fought beneath the tall trees, until thewar-cry was hushed and the Indians glided back into the west. Small wonder thewood is red.
Then came the black slaves. Day after day the clank ofchained feet marching from Virginia and Carolina to Georgia was heard in theserich swamp lands. Day after day the songs of the callous, the wail of themotherless, and the muttered curses of the wretched echoed from the Flint tothe Chickasawhatchee, until by 1860 there had risen in West Dougherty perhapsthe richest slave kingdom the modern world ever knew. A hundred and fiftybarons commanded the labor of nearly six thousand Negroes, held sway over farmswith ninety thousand acres tilled land, valued even in times of cheap soil atthree millions of dollars. Twenty thousand bales of ginned cotton went yearlyto England, New and Old; and men that came there bankrupt made money and grewrich. In a single decade the cotton output increased four-fold and the value oflands was tripled. It was the heyday of the nouveau riche, and a life ofcareless extravagance among the masters.
Four and six bobtailed thoroughbreds rolled their coachesto town; open hospitality and gay entertainment were the rule. Parks and groveswere laid out, rich with flower and vine, and in the midst stood the lowwide-halled "big house," with its porch and columns and greatfireplaces.
And yet with all this there was something sordid,something forced, -- a certain feverish unrest and recklessness; for was notall this show and tinsel built upon a groan? "This land was a littleHell," said a ragged, brown, and grave- faced man to me. We were seatednear a roadside blacksmith shop, and behind was the bare ruin of some master'shome. "I've seen niggers drop dead in the furrow, but they were kickedaside, and the plough never stopped. Down in the guard-house, there's where theblood ran."
With such foundations a kingdom must in time sway andfall. The masters moved to Macon and Augusta, and left only
Page 87
the irresponsible overseers on the land. And the result is such ruin as this,the Lloyd "home-place": -- great waving oaks, a spread of lawn,myrtles and chestnuts, all ragged and wild; a solitary gate-post standing whereonce was a castle entrance; an old rusty anvil lying amid rotting bellows andwood in the ruins of a blacksmith shop; a wide rambling old mansion, brown anddingy, filled now with the grandchildren of the slaves who once waited on itstables; while the family of the master has dwindled to two lone women, who livein Macon and feed hungrily off the remnants of an earldom. So we ride on, pastphantom gates and falling homes, -- past the once flourishing farms of theSmiths, the Gandys, and the Lagores, -- and find all dilapidated and halfruined, even there where a solitary white woman, a relic of other days, sitsalone in state among miles of Negroes and rides to town in her ancient coacheach day.
This was indeed the Egypt of the Confederacy, -- the richgranary whence potatoes and corn and cotton poured out to the famished andragged Confederate troops as they battled for a cause lost long before 1861.Sheltered and secure, it became the place of refuge for families, wealth, andslaves. Yet even then the hard ruthless rape of the land began to tell. Thered-clay sub-soil already had begun to peer above the loam. The harder theslaves were driven the more careless and fatal was their farming. Then came therevolution of war and Emancipation, the bewilderment of Reconstruction, -- andnow, what is the Egypt of the Confederacy, and what mean- ing has it for thenation's weal or woe?
It is a land of rapid contrasts and of curiously mingledhope and pain. Here sits a pretty blue-eyed quadroon hiding her bare feet; shewas married only last week, and yonder in the field is her dark young husband,hoeing to support her, at thirty cents a day without board. Across the way isGatesby, brown and tall, lord of two thousand acres shrewdly won and held.There is a store conducted by his black son, a black- smith shop, and aginnery. Five miles below here is a town owned and controlled by one white NewEnglander. He owns almost a Rhode Island county, with thousands of acres andhundreds of black laborers. Their cabins look better than most, and the farm,with machinery and fertilizers, is much
Page 88
more business-like than any in the county, although the manager drives hardbargains in wages. When now we turn and look five miles above, there on theedge of town are five houses of prostitutes, -- two of blacks and three ofwhites; and in one of the houses of the whites a worthless black boy washarbored too openly two years ago; so he was hanged for rape. And here, too, isthe high whitewashed fence of the "stockade," as the county prison iscalled; the white folks say it is ever full of black criminals, -- the blackfolks say that only colored boys are sent to jail, and they not because theyare guilty, but because the State needs criminals to eke out its income bytheir forced labor.
Immigrants are heirs of the slave baron in Dougherty; andas we ride westward, by wide stretching cornfields and stubby orchards of peachand pear, we see on all sides within the circle of dark forest a Land ofCanaan. Here and there are tales of projects for money-getting, born in theswift days of Reconstruction, -- "improvement" companies, winecompanies, mills and factories; most failed, and foreigners fell heir.
It is a beautiful land, this Dougherty, west of the Flint.The forests are wonderful, the solemn pines have disappeared, and this is the"Oakey Woods," with its wealth of hickories, beeches, oaks andpalmettos. But a pall of debt hangs over the beautiful land; the merchants arein debt to the wholesal- ers, the planters are in debt to the merchants, thetenants owe the planters, and laborers bow and bend beneath the burden of itall. Here and there a man has raised his head above these murky waters. Wepassed one fenced stock-farm with grass and grazing cattle, that looked veryhome-like after endless corn and cotton. Here and there are black free-holders:there is the gaunt dull-black Jackson, with his hundred acres. "I says,'Look up! If you don't look up you can't get up,'" remarks Jackson,philosophically. And he's gotten up. Dark Carter's neat barns would do creditto New England. His master helped him to get a start, but when the black mandied last fall the master's sons immediately laid claim to the estate."And them white folks will get it, too," said my yellow gossip.
I turn from these well-tended acres with a comfortablefeeling that the Negro is rising. Even then, however, the
Page 89
fields, as we proceed, begin to redden and the trees disappear. Rows of oldcabins appear filled with renters and laborers, -- cheerless, bare, and dirty,for the most part, although here and there the very age and decay makes thescene picturesque. A young black fellow greets us. He is twenty- two, and justmarried. Until last year he had good luck renting; then cotton fell, and thesheriff seized and sold all he had. So he moved here, where the rent is higher,the land poorer, and the owner inflexible; he rents a forty-dollar mule fortwenty dollars a year. Poor lad! -- a slave at twenty-two. This plantation,owned now by a foreigner, was a part of the famous Bolton estate. After the warit was for many years worked by gangs of Negro convicts, -- and black convictsthen were even more plentiful than now; it was a way of making Negroes work,and the question of guilt was a minor one. Hard tales of cruelty andmistreatment of the chained freemen are told, but the county authorities weredeaf until the free-labor market was nearly ruined by wholesale migration. Thenthey took the convicts from the plantations, but not until one of the fairestregions of the "Oakey Woods" had been ruined and ravished into a redwaste, out of which only a Yankee or an immigrant could squeeze more blood fromdebt-cursed tenants.
No wonder that Luke Black, slow, dull, and discouraged,shuffles to our carriage and talks hopelessly. Why should he strive? Every yearfinds him deeper in debt. How strange that Georgia, the world-heralded refugeof poor debtors, should bind her own to sloth and misfortune as ruthlessly asever England did! The poor land groans with its birth-pains, and brings forthscarcely a hundred pounds of cotton to the acre, where fifty years ago ityielded eight times as much. Of his meagre yield the tenant pays from a quarterto a third in rent, and most of the rest in interest on food and suppliesbought on credit. Twenty years yonder sunken-cheeked, old black man has laboredunder that system, and now, turned day- laborer, is supporting his wife andboarding himself on his wages of a dollar and a half a week, received only partof the year.
The Bolton convict farm formerly included the neighboringplantation. Here it was that the convicts were lodged in the
Page 90
great log prison still standing. A dismal place it still remains, with rows ofugly huts filled with surly ignorant tenants. "What rent do you payhere?" I inquired. "I don't know, -- what is it, Sam?" "Allwe make," answered Sam. It is a depressing place, -- bare, unshaded, withno charm of past association, only a memory of forced human toil, -- now, then,and before the war. They are not happy, these black men whom we meet throughoutthis region. There is little of the joyous abandon and playfulness which we arewont to associate with the plantation Negro. At best, the natural good-natureis edged with complaint or has changed into sullenness and gloom. And now andthen it blazes forth in veiled but hot anger. I remember one big red-eyed blackwhom we met by the roadside. Forty-five years he had la- bored on this farm,beginning with nothing, and still having nothing. To be sure, he had given fourchildren a common- school training, and perhaps if the new fence-law had notallowed unfenced crops in West Dougherty he might have raised a little stockand kept ahead. As it is, he is hopelessly in debt, disappointed, andembittered. He stopped us to in- quire after the black boy in Albany, whom itwas said a policeman had shot and killed for loud talking on the side- walk.And then he said slowly: "Let a white man touch me, and he dies; I don'tboast this, -- I don't say it around loud, or before the children, -- but Imean it. I've seen them whip my father and my old mother in them cotton-rowstill the blood ran; by -- " and we passed on.
Now Sears, whom we met next lolling under the chubbyoak-trees, was of quite different fibre. Happy? -- Well, yes; he laughed andflipped pebbles, and thought the world was as it was. He had worked here twelveyears and has nothing but a mortgaged mule. Children? Yes, seven; but theyhadn't been to school this year, -- couldn't afford books and clothes, andcouldn't spare their work. There go part of them to the fields now, -- threebig boys astride mules, and a strapping girl with bare brown legs. Carelessignorance and laziness here, fierce hate and vindictiveness there; -- these arethe extremes of the Negro problem which we met that day, and we scarce knewwhich we preferred.
Here and there we meet distinct characters quite out ofthe
Page 91
ordinary. One came out of a piece of newly cleared ground, making a wide detourto avoid the snakes. He was an old, hollow-cheeked man, with a drawn andcharacterful brown face. He had a sort of self-contained quaintness and roughhumor impossible to describe; a certain cynical earnestness that puzzled one."The niggers were jealous of me over on the other place," he said,"and so me and the old woman begged this piece of woods, and I cleared itup myself. Made nothing for two years, but I reckon I've got a crop now."The cotton looked tall and rich, and we praised it. He curtsied low, and thenbowed almost to the ground, with an imperturbable gravity that seemed almostsuspicious. Then he con- tinued, "My mule died last week," -- acalamity in this land equal to a devastating fire in town, -- "but a whiteman loaned me another." Then he added, eyeing us, "Oh, I gets alongwith white folks." We turned the conversation. "Bears? deer?" heanswered, "well, I should say there were," and he let fly a string ofbrave oaths, as he told hunting-tales of the swamp. We left him standing stillin the middle of the road looking after us, and yet apparently not noticing us.
The Whistle place, which includes his bit of land, wasbought soon after the war by an English syndicate, the "Dixie Cotton andCorn Company." A marvellous deal of style their factor put on, with hisservants and coach-and-six; so much so that the concern soon landed ininextricable bankruptcy. Nobody lives in the old house now, but a man comeseach winter out of the North and collects his high rents. I know not which arethe more touching, -- such old empty houses, or the homes of the masters' sons.Sad and bitter tales lie hidden back of those white doors, -- tales of poverty,of struggle, of disappointment. A revolution such as that of '63 is a terriblething; they that rose rich in the morning often slept in pau- pers' beds.Beggars and vulgar speculators rose to rule over them, and their children wentastray. See yonder sad-colored house, with its cabins and fences and gladcrops! It is not glad within; last month the prodigal son of the strugglingfather wrote home from the city for money. Money! Where was it to come from?And so the son rose in the night and killed his baby, and killed his wife, andshot himself dead. And the world passed on.
Page 92
I remember wheeling around a bend in the road beside agraceful bit of forest and a singing brook. A long low house faced us, withporch and flying pillars, great oaken door, and a broad lawn shining in theevening sun. But the window-panes were gone, the pillars were worm-eaten, andthe moss- grown roof was falling in. Half curiously I peered through theunhinged door, and saw where, on the wall across the hall, was written in oncegay letters a faded "Welcome."
Quite a contrast to the southwestern part of DoughertyCounty is the northwest. Soberly timbered in oak and pine, it has none of thathalf-tropical luxuriance of the southwest. Then, too, there are fewer signs ofa romantic past, and more of systematic modern land-grabbing and money-getting.White people are more in evidence here, and farmer and hired labor replace tosome extent the absentee landlord and rack-rented tenant. The crops haveneither the luxuriance of the richer land nor the signs of neglect so oftenseen, and there were fences and meadows here and there. Most of this land waspoor, and beneath the notice of the slave-baron, before the war. Since then hispoor relations and foreign immigrants have seized it. The returns of the farmerare too small to allow much for wages, and yet he will not sell off smallfarms. There is the Negro Sanford; he has worked fourteen years as overseer onthe Ladson place, and "paid out enough for fertilizers to have bought afarm," but the owner will not sell off a few acres.
Two children -- a boy and a girl -- are hoeing sturdilyin the fields on the farm where Corliss works. He is smooth-faced and brown,and is fencing up his pigs. He used to run a successful cotton-gin, but theCotton Seed Oil Trust has forced the price of ginning so low that he says ithardly pays him. He points out a stately old house over the way as the home of"Pa Willis." We eagerly ride over, for "Pa Willis" was thetall and powerful black Moses who led the Negroes for a generation, and ledthem well. He was a Baptist preacher, and when he died, two thousand blackpeople followed him to the grave; and now they preach his funeral sermon eachyear. His widow lives here, -- a weazened, sharp-featured little woman, whocurtsied quaintly as we greeted her. Further on lives Jack Delson, the mostprosperous Negro farmer
Page 93
in the county. It is a joy to meet him, -- a great broad-shouldered, handsomeblack man, intelligent and jovial. Six hundred and fifty acres he owns, and haseleven black tenants. A neat and tidy home nestled in a flower-garden, and alittle store stands beside it.
We pass the Munson place, where a plucky white widow isrenting and struggling; and the eleven hundred acres of the Sennet plantation,with its Negro overseer. Then the character of the farms begins to change.Nearly all the lands belong to Russian Jews; the overseers are white, and thecabins are bare board-houses scattered here and there. The rents are high, andday-laborers and "contract" hands abound. It is a keen, hard strugglefor living here, and few have time to talk. Tired with the long ride, we gladlydrive into Gillonsville. It is a silent cluster of farmhouses standing on thecrossroads, with one of its stores closed and the other kept by a Negropreacher. They tell great tales of busy times at Gillonsville before all therailroads came to Albany; now it is chiefly a memory. Riding down the street,we stop at the preacher's and seat ourselves before the door. It was one ofthose scenes one cannot soon forget: -- a wide, low, little house, whosemotherly roof reached over and sheltered a snug little porch. There we sat,after the long hot drive, drinking cool water, -- the talkative little store-keeper who is my daily companion; the silent old black woman patchingpantaloons and saying never a word; the ragged picture of helpless misfortunewho called in just to see the preacher; and finally the neat matronlypreacher's wife, plump, yellow, and intelligent. "Own land?" said thewife; "well, only this house." Then she added quietly. "We didbuy seven hundred acres across up yonder, and paid for it; but they cheated usout of it. Sells was the owner." "Sells!" echoed the raggedmisfortune, who was leaning against the balustrade and listening, "he's aregular cheat. I worked for him thirty-seven days this spring, and he paid mein card- board checks which were to be cashed at the end of the month. But henever cashed them, -- kept putting me off. Then the sheriff came and took mymule and corn and furni- ture -- " "Furniture? But furniture isexempt from seizure by law." "Well, he took it just the same,"said the hard-faced man.
Page 94
But the Brute said in hisbreast, "Till the mills I grind have ceased, The riches shall be dust ofdust, dry ashes be the feast!
"On the strong and cunning few
Cynic favors I will strew;
I will stuff their maw with overplus until their spirit dies;
From the patient and the low
I will take the joys they know;
They shall hunger after vanities and still an-hungered go.
Madness shall be on the people, ghastly jealousies arise;
Brother's blood shall cry on brother up the dead and empty
skies.
WILLIAM VAUGHN MOODY.
Have you ever seen a cotton-field white with harvest, --its golden fleece hovering above the black earth like a silvery cloud edgedwith dark green, its bold white signals waving like the foam of billows fromCarolina to Texas across that Black and human Sea? I have sometimes halfsuspected that here the winged ram Chrysomallus left that Fleece after whichJason and his Argonauts went vaguely wandering into the shadowy East threethousand years ago; and certainly one
Page 95
might frame a pretty and not far-fetched analogy of witchery and dragons'teeth, and blood and armed men, between the ancient and the modern quest of theGolden Fleece in the Black Sea.
And now the golden fleece is found; not only found, but,in its birthplace, woven. For the hum of the cotton-mills is the newest andmost significant thing in the New South to-day. All through the Carolinas andGeorgia, away down to Mexico, rise these gaunt red buildings, bare and homely,and yet so busy and noisy withal that they scarce seem to belong to the slowand sleepy land. Perhaps they sprang from dragons' teeth. So the Cotton Kingdomstill lives; the world still bows beneath her sceptre. Even the markets thatonce defied the parvenu have crept one by one across the seas, and thenslowly and reluctantly, but surely, have started toward the Black Belt.
To be sure, there are those who wag their heads knowinglyand tell us that the capital of the Cotton Kingdom has moved from the Black tothe White Belt, -- that the Negro of to-day raises not more than half of thecotton crop. Such men forget that the cotton crop has doubled, and more thandoubled, since the era of slavery, and that, even granting their contention,the Negro is still supreme in a Cotton Kingdom larger than that on which theConfederacy builded its hopes. So the Negro forms to-day one of the chieffigures in a great world-industry; and this, for its own sake, and in the lightof historic interest, makes the field-hands of the cotton country worthstudying.
We seldom study the condition of the Negro to-dayhonestly and carefully. It is so much easier to assume that we know it all. Orperhaps, having already reached conclusions in our own minds, we are loth tohave them disturbed by facts. And yet how little we really know of thesemillions, -- of their daily lives and longings, of their homely joys andsorrows, of their real shortcomings and the meaning of their crimes! All thiswe can only learn by intimate contact with the masses, and not by wholesalearguments covering millions separate in time and space, and differing widely intraining and culture. To-day, then, my reader, let us turn our faces to
Page 96
the Black Belt of Georgia and seek simply to know the condition of the blackfarm-laborers of one county there.
Here in 1890 lived ten thousand Negroes and two thousandwhites. The country is rich, yet the people are poor. The keynote of the BlackBelt is debt; not commercial credit, but debt in the sense of continuedinability on the part of the mass of the population to make income coverexpense. This is the direct heritage of the South from the wasteful economiesof the slave regime; but it was emphasized and brought to a crisis bythe Emancipation of the slaves. In 1860, Dougherty County had six thousandslaves, worth at least two and a half millions of dollars; its farms wereestimated at three millions, -- making five and a half millions of property,the value of which depended largely on the slave system, and on the speculativedemand for land once marvellously rich but already partially devitalized bycareless and exhaustive culture. The war then meant a financial crash; in placeof the five and a half millions of 1860, there remained in 1870 only farmsvalued at less than two millions. With this came increased competition incotton culture from the rich lands of Texas; a steady fall in the normal priceof cotton followed, from about fourteen cents a pound in 1860 until it reachedfour cents in 1898. Such a financial revolution was it that involved the ownersof the cotton-belt in debt. And if things went ill with the master, how faredit with the man?
The plantations of Dougherty County in slavery days werenot as imposing and aristocratic as those of Virginia. The Big House wassmaller and usually one-storied, and sat very near the slave cabins. Sometimesthese cabins stretched off on either side like wings; sometimes only on oneside, forming a double row, or edging the road that turned into the plantationfrom the main thoroughfare. The form and disposition of the laborers' cabinsthroughout the Black Belt is to-day the same as in slavery days. Some live inthe self-same cabins, others in cabins rebuilt on the sites of the old. All aresprinkled in little groups over the face of the land, centering about somedilapidated Big House where the head-tenant or agent lives. The generalcharacter and arrangement of these dwellings remains on the whole unaltered.There were in the county, outside the corporate town of Albany, about fifteenhundred
Page 97
Negro families in 1898. Out of all these, only a single family occupied a housewith seven rooms; only fourteen have five rooms or more. The mass live inone-and two-room homes.
The size and arrangements of a people's homes are nounfair index of their condition. If, then, we inquire more carefully into theseNegro homes, we find much that is unsatisfactory. All over the face of the landis the one-room cabin, -- now standing in the shadow of the Big House, nowstaring at the dusty road, now rising dark and sombre amid the green of thecotton-fields. It is nearly always old and bare, built of rough boards, andneither plastered nor ceiled. Light and ventilation are supplied by the singledoor and by the square hole in the wall with its wooden shutter. There is noglass, porch, or ornamentation without. Within is a fireplace, black and smoky,and usually unsteady with age. A bed or two, a table, a wooden chest, and a fewchairs compose the furniture; while a stray show-bill or a newspaper makes upthe decorations for the walls. Now and then one may find such a cabin keptscrupulously neat, with merry steaming fireplaces and hospitable door; but themajority are dirty and dilapidated, smelling of eating and sleeping, poorlyventilated, and anything but homes.
Above all, the cabins are crowded. We have come toassociate crowding with homes in cities almost exclusively. This is primarilybecause we have so little accurate knowledge of country life. Here in DoughertyCounty one may find families of eight and ten occupying one or two rooms, andfor every ten rooms of house accommodation for the Negroes there aretwenty-five persons. The worst tenement abominations of New York do not haveabove twenty-two persons for every ten rooms. Of course, one small, close roomin a city, without a yard, is in many respects worse than the larger singlecountry room. In other respects it is better; it has glass windows, a decentchimney, and a trustworthy floor. The single great advantage of the Negropeasant is that he may spend most of his life outside his hovel, in the openfields.
There are four chief causes of these wretched homes:First, long custom born of slavery has assigned such homes to Negroes; whitelaborers would be offered better accommodations, and might, for that andsimilar reasons, give better
Page 98
work. Secondly, the Negroes, used to such accommodations, do not as a ruledemand better; they do not know what better houses mean. Thirdly, the landlordsas a class have not yet come to realize that it is a good business investmentto raise the standard of living among labor by slow and judicious methods; thata Negro laborer who demands three rooms and fifty cents a day would give moreefficient work and leave a larger profit than a discouraged toiler herding hisfamily in one room and working for thirty cents. Lastly, among such conditionsof life there are few incentives to make the laborer become a better farmer. Ifhe is ambitious, he moves to town or tries other labor; as a tenant-farmer hisoutlook is almost hopeless, and following it as a makeshift, he takes the housethat is given him without protest.
In such homes, then, these Negro peasants live. Thefamilies are both small and large; there are many single tenants, -- widows andbachelors, and remnants of broken groups. The system of labor and the size ofthe houses both tend to the breaking up of family groups: the grown children goaway as contract hands or migrate to town, the sister goes into service; and soone finds many families with hosts of babies, and many newly married couples,but comparatively few families with half-grown and grown sons and daughters.The average size of Negro families has undoubtedly decreased since the war,primarily from economic stress. In Russia over a third of the bridegrooms andover half the brides are under twenty; the same was true of the antebellumNegroes. Today, however, very few of the boys and less than a fifth of theNegro girls under twenty are married. The young men marry between the ages oftwenty-five and thirty-five; the young women between twenty and thirty. Suchpostponement is due to the difficulty of earning sufficient to rear and supporta family; and it undoubtedly leads, in the country districts, to sexualimmorality. The form of this immorality, however, is very seldom that ofprostitution, and less frequently that of illegitimacy than one would imagine.Rather, it takes the form of separation and desertion after a family group hasbeen formed. The number of separated persons is thirty-five to the thousand, --a very large number. It would of course be unfair to compare this number withdivorce
Page 99
statistics, for many of these separated women are in reality widowed, were thetruth known, and in other cases the separation is not permanent. Nevertheless,here lies the seat of greatest moral danger. There is little or no prostitutionamong these Negroes, and over three-fourths of the families, as found byhouse-to-house investigation, deserve to be classed as decent people withconsiderable regard for female chastity. To be sure, the ideas of the masswould not suit New England, and there are many loose habits and notions. Yetthe rate of illegitimacy is undoubtedly lower than in Austria or Italy, and thewomen as a class are modest. The plague- spot in sexual relations is easymarriage and easy separation. This is no sudden development, nor the fruit ofEmancipation. It is the plain heritage from slavery. In those days Sam, withhis master's consent, "took up" with Mary. No ceremony was necessary,and in the busy life of the great planta- tions of the Black Belt it wasusually dispensed with. If now the master needed Sam's work in anotherplantation or in another part of the same plantation, or if he took a notion tosell the slave, Sam's married life with Mary was usually unceremoniouslybroken, and then it was clearly to the master's interest to have both of themtake new mates. This widespread custom of two centuries has not been eradicatedin thirty years. To-day Sam's grandson "takes up" with a womanwithout license or ceremony; they live together decently and honestly, and are,to all intents and purposes, man and wife. Sometimes these unions are neverbroken until death; but in too many cases family quarrels, a roving spirit, arival suitor, or perhaps more frequently the hopeless battle to support afamily, lead to separation, and a broken house-hold is the result. The Negrochurch has done much to stop this practice, and now most marriage ceremoniesare performed by the pastors. Nevertheless, the evil is still deep seated, andonly a general raising of the standard of living will finally cure it.
Looking now at the county black population as a whole, itis fair to characterize it as poor and ignorant. Perhaps ten per cent composethe well-to-do and the best of the laborers, while at least nine per cent arethoroughly lewd and vicious. The rest, over eighty per cent, are poor andignorant, fairly
Page 100
honest and well meaning, plodding, and to a degree shiftless, with some but notgreat sexual looseness. Such class lines are by no means fixed; they vary, onemight almost say, with the price of cotton. The degree of ignorance cannoteasily be expressed. We may say, for instance, that nearly two-thirds of themcannot read or write. This but partially expresses the fact. They are ignorantof the world about them, of modern economic organization, of the function ofgovernment, of individual worth and possibilities, -- of nearly all thosethings which slavery in self-defence had to keep them from learning. Much thatthe white boy imbibes from his earliest social atmosphere forms the puzzlingproblems of the black boy's mature years. America is not another word forOpportunity to all her sons.
It is easy for us to lose ourselves in details inendeavoring to grasp and comprehend the real condition of a mass of humanbeings. We often forget that each unit in the mass is a throbbing human soul.Ignorant it may be, and poverty stricken, black and curious in limb and waysand thought; and yet it loves and hates, it toils and tires, it laughs andweeps its bitter tears, and looks in vague and awful longing at the grimhorizon of its life, -- all this, even as you and I. These black thousands arenot in reality lazy; they are improvident and careless; they insist on breakingthe monotony of toil with a glimpse at the great town-world on Saturday; theyhave their loafers and their rascals; but the great mass of them workcontinuously and faithfully for a return, and under circumstances that wouldcall forth equal voluntary effort from few if any other modern laboring class.Over eighty-eight per cent of them -- men, women, and children -- are farmers.Indeed, this is almost the only industry. Most of the children get theirschooling after the "crops are laid by," and very few there are thatstay in school after the spring work has begun. Child-labor is to be found herein some of its worst phases, as fostering ignorance and stunting physicaldevelopment. With the grown men of the county there is little variety in work:thirteen hundred are farmers, and two hundred are laborers, teamsters, etc.,including twenty-four artisans, ten merchants, twenty-one preachers, and fourteachers. This narrowness of life reaches its maximum among the women: thirteenhundred
Page 101
and fifty of these are farm laborers, one hundred are servants and washerwomen,leaving sixty-five housewives, eight teach- ers, and six seamstresses.
Among this people there is no leisure class. We oftenforget that in the United States over half the youth and adults are not in theworld earning incomes, but are making homes, learning of the world, or restingafter the heat of the strife. But here ninety-six per cent are toiling; no onewith leisure to turn the bare and cheerless cabin into a home, no old folks tosit beside the fire and hand down traditions of the past; little of carelesshappy childhood and dreaming youth. The dull monotony of daily toil is brokenonly by the gayety of the thoughtless and the Saturday trip to town. The toil,like all farm toil, is monotonous, and here there are little machinery and fewtools to relieve its burdensome drudgery. But with all this, it is work in thepure open air, and this is something in a day when fresh air is scarce.
The land on the whole is still fertile, despite longabuse. For nine or ten months in succession the crops will come if asked:garden vegetables in April, grain in May, melons in June and July, hay inAugust, sweet potatoes in September, and cotton from then to Christmas. And yeton two-thirds of the land there is but one crop, and that leaves the toilers indebt. Why is this?
Away down the Baysan road, where the broad flat fieldsare flanked by great oak forests, is a plantation; many thou- sands of acres itused to run, here and there, and beyond the great wood. Thirteen hundred humanbeings here obeyed the call of one, -- were his in body, and largely in soul.One of them lives there yet, -- a short, stocky man, his dull-brown face seamedand drawn, and his tightly curled hair gray- white. The crops? Just tolerable,he said; just tolerable. Get- ting on? No -- he wasn't getting on at all. Smithof Albany "furnishes" him, and his rent is eight hundred pounds ofcotton. Can't make anything at that. Why didn't he buy land! Humph! Takes moneyto buy land. And he turns away. Free! The most piteous thing amid all the blackruin of war-time, amid the broken fortunes of the masters, the blighted hopesof mothers and maidens, and the fall of an empire, -- the most piteous thingamid all this was the black freedman who threw
Page 102
down his hoe because the world called him free. What did such a mockery offreedom mean? Not a cent of money, not an inch of land, not a mouthful ofvictuals, -- not even ownership of the rags on his back. Free! On Saturday,once or twice a month, the old master, before the war, used to dole out baconand meal to his Negroes. And after the first flush of freedom wore off, and histrue helplessness dawned on the freedman, he came back and picked up his hoe,and old master still doled out his bacon and meal. The legal form of servicewas theoretically far different; in practice, task-work or "cropping"was substituted for daily toil in gangs; and the slave gradually became ametayer, or tenant on shares, in name, but a laborer with indeterminate wagesin fact.
Still the price of cotton fell, and gradually thelandlords deserted their plantations, and the reign of the merchant began. Themerchant of the Black Belt is a curious institution, -- part banker, partlandlord, part banker, and part despot. His store, which used most frequentlyto stand at the cross-roads and become the centre of a weekly village, has nowmoved to town; and thither the Negro tenant follows him. The merchant keepseverything, -- clothes and shoes, coffee and sugar, pork and meal, canned anddried goods, wagons and ploughs, seed and fertilizer, -- and what he has not instock he can give you an order for at the store across the way. Here, then,comes the tenant, Sam Scott, after he has contracted with some absentlandlord's agent for hiring forty acres of land; he fingers his hat nervouslyuntil the merchant finishes his morning chat with Colonel Saunders, and callsout, "Well, Sam, what do you want?" Sam wants him to"furnish" him, -- i.e., to advance him food and clothing for theyear, and perhaps seed and tools, until his crop is raised and sold. If Samseems a favorable subject, he and the merchant go to a lawyer, and Sam executesa chattel mortgage on his mule and wagon in return for seed and a week'srations. As soon as the green cotton-leaves appear above the ground, anothermortgage is given on the "crop." Every Saturday, or at longerintervals, Sam calls upon the merchant for his "rations"; a family offive usually gets about thirty pounds of fat side-pork and a couple of bushelsof cornmeal a month. Besides this, clothing and shoes must be furnished; if Samor his family is sick, there are orders on the druggist and
Page 103
doctor; if the mule wants shoeing, an order on the black- smith, etc. If Sam isa hard worker and crops promise well, he is often encouraged to buy more, --sugar, extra clothes, perhaps a buggy. But he is seldom encouraged to save.When cotton rose to ten cents last fall, the shrewd merchants of DoughertyCounty sold a thousand buggies in one season, mostly to black men.
The security offered for such transactions -- a crop andchattel mortgage -- may at first seem slight. And, indeed, the merchants tellmany a true tale of shiftlessness and cheating; of cotton picked at night,mules disappearing, and tenants absconding. But on the whole the merchant ofthe Black Belt is the most prosperous man in the section. So skilfully and soclosely has he drawn the bonds of the law about the tenant, that the black manhas often simply to choose between pauperism and crime; he "waives"all homestead exemptions in his contract; he cannot touch his own mortgagedcrop, which the laws put almost in the full control of the land-owner and ofthe merchant. When the crop is growing the merchant watches it like a hawk; assoon as it is ready for market he takes possession of it, sells it, pays thelandowner his rent, subtracts his bill for supplies, and if, as sometimeshappens, there is anything left, he hands it over to the black serf for hisChristmas celebration.
The direct result of this system is an all-cotton schemeof agriculture and the continued bankruptcy of the tenant. The currency of theBlack Belt is cotton. It is a crop always salable for ready money, not usuallysubject to great yearly fluctuations in price, and one which the Negroes knowhow to raise. The landlord therefore demands his rent in cotton, and themerchant will accept mortgages on no other crop. There is no use asking theblack tenant, then, to diversify his crops, -- he cannot under this system.Moreover, the system is bound to bankrupt the tenant. I remember once meeting alittle one-mule wagon on the River road. A young black fellow sat in it drivinglistlessly, his elbows on his knees. His dark-faced wife sat beside him,stolid, silent.
"Hello!" cried my driver, -- he has a mostimprudent way of addressing these people, though they seem used to it, --"what have you got there?"
Page 104
"Meat and meal," answered the man, stopping. Themeat lay uncovered in the bottom of the wagon, -- a great thin side of fat porkcovered with salt; the meal was in a white bushel bag.
"What did you pay for that meat?"
"Ten cents a pound." It could have been boughtfor six or seven cents cash.
"And the meal?"
"Two dollars." One dollar and ten cents is thecash price in town. Here was a man paying five dollars for goods which he couldhave bought for three dollars cash, and raised for one dollar or one dollar anda half.
Yet it is not wholly his fault. The Negro farmer startedbehind, -- started in debt. This was not his choosing, but the crime of thishappy-go-lucky nation which goes blundering along with its Reconstructiontragedies, its Spanish war interludes and Philippine matinees, just as thoughGod really were dead. Once in debt, it is no easy matter for a whole race toemerge.
In the year of low-priced cotton, 1898, out of threehundred tenant families one hundred and seventy-five ended their year's work indebt to the extent of fourteen thousand dollars; fifty cleared nothing, and theremaining seventy-five made a total profit of sixteen hundred dollars. The netindebtedness of the black tenant families of the whole county must have been atleast sixty thousand dollars. In a more prosperous year the situation is farbetter; but on the average the majority of tenants end the year even, or indebt, which means that they work for board and clothes. Such an economicorganization is radically wrong. Whose is the blame?
The underlying causes of this situation are complicatedbut discernible. And one of the chief, outside the carelessness of the nationin letting the slave start with nothing, is the widespread opinion among themerchants and employers of the Black Belt that only by the slavery of debt canthe Negro be kept at work. Without doubt, some pressure was necessary at thebeginning of the free-labor system to keep the listless and lazy at work; andeven to-day the mass of the Negro laborers need stricter guardianship than mostNorthern laborers. Behind this honest and widespread opinion dishonesty
Page 105
and cheating of the ignorant laborers have a good chance to take refuge. And toall this must be added the obvious fact that a slave ancestry and a system ofunrequited toil has not improved the efficiency or temper of the mass of blacklaborers. Nor is this peculiar to Sambo; it has in history been just as true ofJohn and Hans, of Jacques and Pat, of all ground-down peasantries. Such is thesituation of the mass of the Negroes in the Black Belt to-day; and they arethinking about it. Crime, and a cheap and dangerous socialism, are theinevitable results of this pondering. I see now that ragged black man sittingon a log, aimlessly whittling a stick. He muttered to me with the murmur ofmany ages, when he said: "White man sit down whole year; Nigger work dayand night and make crop; Nigger hardly gits bread and meat; white man sittin'down gits all. It's wrong." And what do the better classes ofNegroes do to improve their situation? One of two things: if any way possible,they buy land; if not, they migrate to town. Just as centuries ago it was noeasy thing for the serf to escape into the freedom of town-life, even so to-daythere are hindrances laid in the way of county laborers. In considerable partsof all the Gulf States, and especially in Mississippi, Louisiana, and Arkansas,the Negroes on the plantations in the back-country districts are still held atforced labor practically without wages. Especially is this true in districtswhere the farmers are composed of the more ignorant class of poor whites, andthe Negroes are beyond the reach of schools and intercourse with theiradvancing fellows. If such a peon should run away, the sheriff, elected bywhite suffrage, can usually be depended on to catch the fugitive, return him,and ask no questions. If he escape to another county, a charge of pettythieving, easily true, can be depended upon to secure his return. Even if someunduly officious person insist upon a trial, neighborly comity will probablymake his conviction sure, and then the labor due the county can easily bebought by the master. Such a system is impossible in the more civilized partsof the South, or near the large towns and cities; but in those vast stretchesof land beyond the telegraph and the newspaper the spirit of the ThirteenthAmendment is sadly broken. This represents the lowest economic depths of theblack American peasant; and in a study of the rise and
Page 106
condition of the Negro freeholder we must trace his economic progress from themodern serfdom.
Even in the better-ordered country districts of the Souththe free movement of agricultural laborers is hindered by the migration-agentlaws. The "Associated Press" recently informed the world of thearrest of a young white man in Southern Georgia who represented the"Atlantic Naval Supplies Company," and who "was caught in theact of enticing hands from the turpentine farm of Mr. John Greer." Thecrime for which this young man was arrested is taxed five hundred dollars foreach county in which the employment agent proposes to gather laborers for workoutside the State. Thus the Negroes' ignorance of the labor-market outside hisown vicinity is increased rather than diminished by the laws of nearly everySouthern State.
Similar to such measures is the unwritten law of the backdistricts and small towns of the South, that the character of all Negroesunknown to the mass of the community must be vouched for by some white man.This is really a revival of the old Roman idea of the patron under whoseprotection the new-made freedman was put. In many instances this system hasbeen of great good to the Negro, and very often under the protection andguidance of the former master's family, or other white friends, the freedmanprogressed in wealth and morality. But the same system has in other casesresulted in the refusal of whole communities to recognize the right of a Negroto change his habitation and to be master of his own fortunes. A black strangerin Baker County, Georgia, for instance, is liable to be stopped anywhere on thepublic highway and made to state his business to the satisfaction of any whiteinterrogator. If he fails to give a suitable answer, or seems too independentor "sassy," he may be arrested or summarily driven away.
Thus it is that in the country districts of the South, bywritten or unwritten law, peonage, hindrances to the migration of labor, and asystem of white patronage exists over large areas. Besides this, the chance forlawless oppression and illegal exactions is vastly greater in the country thanin the city, and nearly all the more serious race disturbances of the lastdecade have arisen from disputes in the count between
Page 107
master and man, -- as, for instance, the Sam Hose affair. As a result of such asituation, there arose, first, the Black Belt; and, second, the Migration toTown. The Black Belt was not, as many assumed, a movement toward fields oflabor under more genial climatic conditions; it was primarily a huddling forself-protection, -- a massing of the black popu- lation for mutual defence inorder to secure the peace and tranquillity necessary to economic advance. Thismovement took place between Emancipation and 1880, and only partiallyaccomplished the desired results. The rush to town since 1880 is thecounter-movement of men disappointed in the economic opportunities of the BlackBelt.
In Dougherty County, Georgia, one can see easily theresults of this experiment in huddling for protection. Only ten per cent of theadult population was born in the county, and yet the blacks outnumber thewhites four or five to one. There is undoubtedly a security to the blacks intheir very numbers, -- a personal freedom from arbitrary treatment, which makeshundreds of laborers cling to Dougherty in spite of low wages and economicdistress. But a change is coming, and slowly but surely even here theagricultural laborers are drifting to town and leaving the broad acres behind.Why is this? Why do not the Negroes become land-owners, and build up the blacklanded peasantry, which has for a generation and more been the dream ofphilanthropist and statesman?
To the car-window sociologist, to the man who seeks tounderstand and know the South by devoting the few leisure hours of a holidaytrip to unravelling the snarl of centuries, -- to such men very often the wholetrouble with the black fieldhand may be summed up by Aunt Ophelia's word,"Shiftless!" They have noted repeatedly scenes like one I saw lastsummer. We were riding along the highroad to town at the close of a long hotday. A couple of young black fellows passed us in a muleteam, with severalbushels of loose corn in the ear. One was driving, listlessly bent forward, hiselbows on his knees, -- a happy-go-lucky, careless picture of irresponsibility.The other was fast asleep in the bottom of the wagon. As we passed we noticedan ear of corn fall from the wagon. They never saw it, -- not they. A rodfarther on we noted another ear on the ground; and between that creeping mule
Page 108
and town we counted twenty-six ears of corn. Shiftless? Yes, thepersonification of shiftlessness. And yet follow those boys: they are not lazy;to-morrow morning they'll be up with the sun; they work hard when they do work,and they work willingly. They have no sordid, selfish, money-getting ways, butrather a fine disdain for mere cash. They'll loaf before your face and workbehind your back with good-natured honesty. They'll steal a watermelon, andhand you back your lost purse intact. Their great defect as laborers lies intheir lack of incentive beyond the mere pleasure of physical exertion. They arecareless because they have not found that it pays to be careful; they areimprovident because the improvident ones of their acquaintance get on about aswell as the provident. Above all, they cannot see why they should take unusualpains to make the white man's land better, or to fatten his mule, or save hiscorn. On the other hand, the white land-owner argues that any attempt toimprove these laborers by increased responsibility, or higher wages, or betterhomes, or land of their own, would be sure to result in failure. He shows hisNorthern visitor the scarred and wretched land; the ruined mansions, theworn-out soil and mortgaged acres, and says, This is Negro freedom!
Now it happens that both master and man have just enoughargument on their respective sides to make it difficult for them to understandeach other. The Negro dimly personifies in the white man all his ills andmisfortunes; if he is poor, it is because the white man seizes the fruit of histoil; if he is ignorant, it is because the white man gives him neither time norfacilities to learn; and, indeed, if any misfortune happens to him, it isbecause of some hidden machinations of "white folks." On the otherhand, the masters and the masters' sons have never been able to see why theNegro, instead of settling down to he day-laborers for bread and clothes, areinfected with a silly desire to rise in the world, and why they are sulky,dissatisfied, and careless, where their fathers were happy and dumb andfaithful. "Why, you niggers have an easier time than I do," said apuzzled Albany merchant to his black customer. "Yes," he replied,"and so does yo' hogs."
Taking, then, the dissatisfied and shiftless field-handas a starting-point, let us inquire how the black thousands of
Page 109
Dougherty have struggled from him up toward their ideal, and what that idealis. All social struggle is evidenced by the rise, first of economic, then ofsocial classes, among a homogeneous population. To-day the following economicclasses are plainly differentiated among these Negroes.
A "submerged tenth" of croppers, with a fewpaupers; forty per cent who are metayers and thirty-nine per cent ofsemi-metayers and wage-laborers. There are left five per cent of money-rentersand six per cent of freeholders, -- the "Upper Ten" of the land. Thecroppers are entirely without capital, even in the limited sense of food ormoney to keep them from seed-time to harvest. All they furnish is their labor;the land-owner furnishes land, stock, tools, seed, and house; and at the end ofthe year the laborer gets from a third to a half of the crop. Out of his share,however, comes pay and interest for food and clothing advanced him during theyear. Thus we have a laborer without capital and without wages, and an employerwhose capital is largely his employ- ees' wages. It is an unsatisfactoryarrangement, both for hirer and hired, and is usually in vogue on poor landwith hard- pressed owners.
Above the croppers come the great mass of the blackpopulation who work the land on their own responsibility, paying rent in cottonand supported by the crop-mortgage system. After the war this system wasattractive to the freedmen on account of its larger freedom and its possibilityfor making a surplus. But with the carrying out of the crop-lien system, thedeterioration of the land, and the slavery of debt, the position of themetayers has sunk to a dead level of practically unrewarded toil. Formerly alltenants had some capital, and often considerable; but absentee landlordism,rising rack- rent, and failing cotton have stripped them well-nigh of all, andprobably not over half of them to-day own their mules. The change from cropperto tenant was accomplished by fixing the rent. If, now, the rent fixed wasreasonable, this was an incentive to the tenant to strive. On the other hand,if the rent was too high, or if the land deteriorated, the result was todiscourage and check the efforts of the black peasantry. There is no doubt thatthe latter case is true; that in Dougherty County every economic advantage ofthe price of
Page 110
cotton in market and of the strivings of the tenant has been taken advantage ofby the landlords and merchants, and swallowed up in rent and interest. Ifcotton rose in price, the rent rose even higher; if cotton fell, the rentremained or followed reluctantly. If the tenant worked hard and raised a largecrop, his rent was raised the next year; if that year the crop failed, his cornwas confiscated and his mule sold for debt. There were, of course, exceptionsto this, -- cases of personal kindness and forbearance; but in the vastmajority of cases the rule was to extract the uttermost farthing from the massof the black farm laborers.
The average metayer pays from twenty to thirty per centof his crop in rent. The result of such rack-rent can only be evil, -- abuseand neglect of the soil, deterioration in the character of the laborers, and awidespread sense of injustice. "Wherever the country is poor," criedArthur Young, "it is in the hands of metayers," and "theircondition is more wretched than that of day-laborers." He was talking ofItaly a century ago; but he might have been talking of Dougherty County to-day.And especially is that true to-day which he declares was true in France beforethe Revolution: "The metayers are considered as little better than menialservants, removable at pleasure, and obliged to conform in all things to thewill of the landlords." On this low plane half the black population ofDougherty County -- perhaps more than half the black millions of this land --are to-day struggling.
A degree above these we may place those laborers whoreceive money wages for their work. Some receive a house with perhaps agarden-spot; then supplies of food and clothing are advanced, and certain fixedwages are given at the end of the year, varying from thirty to sixty dollars,out of which the supplies must be paid for, with interest. About eighteen percent of the population belong to this class of semi-metayers, while twenty-twoper cent are laborers paid by the month or year, and are either"furnished" by their own savings or perhaps more usually by somemerchant who takes his chances of payment. Such laborers receive fromthirty-five to fifty cents a day during the working season. They are usuallyyoung unmarried persons, some being women;
Page 111
and when they marry they sink to the class of metayers, or, more seldom, becomerenters.
The renters for fixed money rentals are the first of theemerging classes, and form five per cent of the families. The sole advantage ofthis small class is their freedom to choose their crops, and the increasedresponsibility which comes through having money transactions. While some of therenters differ little in condition from the metayers, yet on the whole they aremore intelligent and responsible persons, and are the ones who eventuallybecome land-owners. Their better character and greater shrewdness enable themto gain, perhaps to demand, better terms in rents; rented farms, vary- ing fromforty to a hundred acres, bear an average rental of about fifty-four dollars ayear. The men who conduct such farms do not long remain renters; either theysink to metayers, or with a successful series of harvests rise to beland-owners.
In 1870 the tax-books of Dougherty report no Negroes aslandholders. If there were any such at that time, -- and there may have been afew, -- their land was probably held in the name of some white patron, -- amethod not uncommon during slavery. In 1875 ownership of land had begun withseven hundred and fifty acres; ten years later this had increased to oversixty-five hundred acres, to nine thousand acres in 1890 and ten thousand in1900. The total assessed property has in this same period risen from eightythousand dollars in 1875 to two hundred and forty thousand dollars in 1900.
Two circumstances complicate this development and make itin some respects difficult to be sure of the real tendencies; they are thepanic of 1893, and the low price of cotton in 1898. Besides this, the system ofassessing property in the country districts of Georgia is somewhat antiquatedand of uncertain statistical value; there are no assessors, and each man makesa sworn return to a tax-receiver. Thus public opinion plays a large part, andthe returns vary strangely from year to year. Certainly these figures show thesmall amount of accumulated capital among the Negroes, and the consequent largedependence of their property on temporary pros- perity. They have little totide over a few years of economic
Page 112
depression, and are at the mercy of the cotton-market far more than the whites.And thus the land-owners, despite their marvellous efforts, are really atransient class, continually being depleted by those who fall back into theclass of renters or metayers, and augmented by newcomers from the masses. Ofone hundred land-owners in 1898, half had bought their land since 1893, afourth between 1890 and 1893, a fifth between 1884 and 1890, and the restbetween 1870 and 1884. In all, one hundred and eighty-five Negroes have ownedland in this county since 1875.
If all the black land-owners who had ever held land herehad kept it or left it in the hands of black men, the Negroes would have ownednearer thirty thousand acres than the fifteen thousand they now hold. And yetthese fifteen thousand acres are a creditable showing, -- a proof of no littleweight of the worth and ability of the Negro people. If they had been given aneconomic start at Emancipation, if they had been in an enlightened and richcommunity which really desired their best good, then we might perhaps call sucha result small or even insignificant. But for a few thousand poor ignorantfield-hands, in the face of poverty, a falling market, and social stress, tosave and capitalize two hundred thousand dollars in a generation has meant atremendous effort. The rise of a nation, the pressing forward of a socialclass, means a bitter struggle, a hard and soul-sickening battle with the worldsuch as few of the more favored classes know or appreciate.
Out of the hard economic conditions of this portion ofthe Black Belt, only six per cent of the population have succeeded in emerginginto peasant proprietorship; and these are not all firmly fixed, but grow andshrink in number with the wavering of the cotton-market. Fully ninety-four percent have struggled for land and failed, and half of them sit in hopelessserfdom. For these there is one other avenue of escape toward which they haveturned in increasing numbers, namely, migration to town. A glance at thedistribution of land among the black owners curiously reveals this fact. In1898 the holdings were as follows: Under forty acres, forty-nine fami- lies;forty to two hundred and fifty acres, seventeen families; two hundred and fiftyto one thousand acres, thirteen families
Page 113
lies; one thousand or more acres, two families. Now in 1890 there wereforty-four holdings, but only nine of these were under forty acres. The greatincrease of holdings, then, has come in the buying of small homesteads neartown, where their owners really share in the town life; this is a part of therush to town. And for every land-owner who has thus hurried away from thenarrow and hard conditions of country life, how many field-hands, how manytenants, how many ruined renters, have joined that long procession? Is it notstrange compensation? The sin of the country districts is visited on the town,and the social sores of city life to-day may, here in Dougherty County, andperhaps in many places near and far, look for their final healing without thecity walls.
Page 114
Life treads on life, and heart on heart;
We press too close in church and mart
To keep a dream or grave apart.
MRS. BROWNING.
The world-old phenomenon of the contact of diverse racesof men is to have new exemplification during the new century. Indeed, thecharacteristic of our age is the contact of European civilization with theworld's undeveloped peoples. Whatever we may say of the results of such contactin the past, it certainly forms a chapter in human action not pleasant to lookback upon. War, murder, slavery, extermination, and debauchery, -- this hasagain and again been the result of carrying civilization and the blessed gospelto the isles of the sea and the heathen without the law. Nor does it altogethersatisfy the conscience of the modern world to be told compla- cently that allthis has been right and proper, the fated triumph of strength over weakness, ofrighteousness over evil, of superiors over inferiors. It would certainly besoothing
Page 115
ing if one could readily believe all this; and yet there are too many uglyfacts for everything to be thus easily explained away. We feel and know thatthere are many delicate differences in race psychology, numberless changes thatour crude social measurements are not yet able to follow minutely, whichexplain much of history and social development. At the same time, too, we knowthat these considerations have never adequately explained or excused thetriumph of brute force and cunning over weakness and innocence.
It is, then, the strife of all honorable men of thetwentieth century to see that in the future competition of races the survivalof the fittest shall mean the triumph of the good, the beautiful, and the true;that we may be able to preserve for future civilization all that is really fineand noble and strong, and not continue to put a premium on greed and impudenceand cruelty. To bring this hope to fruition, we are compelled daily to turnmore and more to a conscientious study of the phenomena of race-contact, -- toa study frank and fair, and not falsified and colored by our wishes or ourfears. And we have in the South as fine a field for such a study as the worldaffords, -- a field, to be sure, which the average American scientist deemssomewhat beneath his dignity, and which the average man who is not a scientistknows all about, but nevertheless a line of study which by reason of theenormous race complications with which God seems about to punish this nationmust increasingly claim our sober attention, study, and thought, we must ask,what are the actual relations of whites and blacks in the South? and we must beanswered, not by apology or fault-finding, but by a plain, unvarnished tale.
In the civilized life of to-day the contact of men andtheir relations to each other fall in a few main lines of action andcommunication: there is, first, the physical proximity of home anddwelling-places, the way in which neighborhoods group themselves, and thecontiguity of neighborhoods. Secondly, and in our age chiefest, there are theeconomic relations, -- the methods by which individuals cooperate for earning aliving, for the mutual satisfaction of wants, for the production of wealth.Next, there are the political relations, the cooperation
Page 116
in social control, in group government, in laying and paying the burden oftaxation. In the fourth place there are the less tangible but highly importantforms of intellectual contact and commerce, the interchange of ideas throughconversation and conference, through periodicals and libraries; and, above all,the gradual formation for each community of that curious tertium quidwhich we call public opinion. Closely allied with this come the various formsof social contact in everyday life, in travel, in theatres, in housegatherings, in marrying and giving in marriage. Finally, there are the varyingforms of religious enterprise, of moral teaching and benevolent endeavor. Theseare the principal ways in which men living in the same communities are broughtinto contact with each other. It is my present task, therefore, to indicate,from my point of view, how the black race in the South meet and mingle with thewhites in these matters of everyday life.
First, as to physical dwelling. It is usually possible todraw in nearly every Southern community a physical color-line on the map, onthe one side of which whites dwell and on the other Negroes. The winding andintricacy of the geographical color-line varies, of course, in differentcommunities. I know some towns where a straight line drawn through the middleof the main street separates nine-tenths of the whites from nine- tenths of theblacks. In other towns the older settlement of whites has been encircled by abroad band of blacks; in still other cases little settlements or nuclei ofblacks have sprung up amid surrounding whites. Usually in cities each streethas its distinctive color, and only now and then do the colors meet in closeproximity. Even in the country something of this segregation is manifest in thesmaller areas, and of course in the larger phenomena of the Black Belt.
All this segregation by color is largely independent ofthat natural clustering by social grades common to all communities. A Negroslum may be in dangerous proximity to a white residence quarter, while it isquite common to find a white slum planted in the heart of a respectable Negrodistrict. One thing, however, seldom occurs: the best of the whites and thebest of the Negroes almost never live in anything like close proximity. It thushappens that in nearly every Southern town
Page 117
and city, both whites and blacks see commonly the worst of each other. This isa vast change from the situation in the past, when, through the close contactof master and house- servant in the patriarchal big house, one found the bestof both races in close contact and sympathy, while at the same time the squalorand dull round of toil among the field-hands was removed from the sight andhearing of the family. One can easily see how a person who saw slavery thusfrom his father's parlors, and sees freedom on the streets of a great city,fails to grasp or comprehend the whole of the new picture. On the other hand,the settled belief of the mass of the Negroes that the Southern white people donot have the black man's best interests at heart has been intensified in lateryears by this continual daily contact of the better class of blacks with theworst representatives of the white race.
Coming now to the economic relations of the races, we areon ground made familiar by study, much discussion, and no little philanthropiceffort. And yet with all this there are many essential elements in thecooperation of Negroes and whites for work and wealth that are too readilyoverlooked or not thoroughly understood. The average American can easilyconceive of a rich land awaiting development and filled with black laborers. Tohim the Southern problem is simply that of making efficient workingmen out ofthis material, by giving them the requisite technical skill and the help ofinvested capital. The problem, however, is by no means as simple as this, fromthe obvious fact that these workingmen have been trained for centuries asslaves. They exhibit, therefore, all the advantages and defects of suchtraining; they are willing and good-natured, but not self-reliant, provident,or careful. If now the economic development of the South is to be pushed to theverge of exploitation, as seems probable, then we have a mass of workingmenthrown into relentless competition with the workingmen of the world, buthandicapped by a training the very opposite to that of the modern self-reliantdemocratic laborer. What the black laborer needs is careful personal guidance,group leadership of men with hearts in their bosoms, to train them toforesight, carefulness, and honesty. Nor does it require any fine-spun theoriesof racial differences to prove the necessity of such group training after
Page 118
the brains of the race have been knocked out by two hundred and fifty years ofassiduous education in submission, carelessness, and stealing. AfterEmancipation, it was the plain duty of some one to assume this group leadershipand training of the Negro laborer. I will not stop here to inquire whose dutyit was -- whether that of the white ex-master who had profited by unpaid toil,or the Northern philanthropist whose persistence brought on the crisis, or theNational Government whose edict freed the bondmen; I will not stop to ask whoseduty it was, but I insist it was the duty of some one to see that theseworkingmen were not left alone and unguided, without capital, without land,without skill, without economic organization, without even the bald protectionof law, order, and decency, -- left in a great land, not to settle down to slowand careful internal development, but destined to be thrown almost immediatelyinto relentless and sharp competition with the best of modern workingmen underan economic system where every participant is fighting for himself, and toooften utterly regardless of the rights or welfare of his neighbor.
For we must never forget that the economic system of theSouth to-day which has succeeded the old regime is not the same system as thatof the old industrial North, of England, or of France, with their trade-unions,their restrictive laws, their written and unwritten commercial customs, andtheir long experience. It is, rather, a copy of that England of the earlynineteenth century, before the factory acts, -- the England that wrung pityfrom thinkers and fired the wrath of Carlyle. The rod of empire that passedfrom the hands of Southern gentlemen in 1865, partly by force, partly by theirown petulance, has never returned to them. Rather it has passed to those menwho have come to take charge of the industrial exploitation of the New South,-- the sons of poor whites fired with a new thirst for wealth and power,thrifty and avaricious Yankees, and unscrupulous immigrants. Into the hands ofthese men the Southern laborers, white and black, have fallen; and this totheir sorrow. For the laborers as such, there is in these new captains ofindustry neither love nor hate, neither sympathy nor romance; it is a coldquestion of dollars and dividends. Under such a system all labor is
Page 119
bound to suffer. Even the white laborers are not yet intelligent, thrifty, andwell trained enough to maintain themselves against the powerful inroads oforganized capital. The results among them, even, are long hours of toil, lowwages, child labor, and lack of protection against usury and cheating. Butamong the black laborers all this is aggravated, first, by a race prejudicewhich varies from a doubt and distrust among the best element of whites to afrenzied hatred among the worst; and, secondly, it is aggravated, as I havesaid before, by the wretched economic heritage of the freedmen from slavery.With this training it is difficult for the freedman to learn to grasp theopportunities already opened to him, and the new opportunities are seldom givenhim, but go by favor to the whites.
Left by the best elements of the South with littleprotection or oversight, he has been made in law and custom the victim of theworst and most unscrupulous men in each community. The crop-lien system whichis depopulating the fields of the South is not simply the result ofshiftlessness on the part of Negroes, but is also the result of cunninglydevised laws as to mortgages, liens, and misdemeanors, which can be made byconscienceless men to entrap and snare the unwary until escape is impossible,further toil a farce, and protest a crime. I have seen, in the Black Belt ofGeorgia, an ignorant, honest Negro buy and pay for a farm in installments threeseparate times, and then in the face of law and decency the enterprisingAmerican who sold it to him pocketed the money and deed and left the black manlandless, to labor on his own land at thirty cents a day. I have seen a blackfarmer fall in debt to a white storekeeper, and that storekeeper go to his farmand strip it of every single marketable article, -- mules, ploughs, storedcrops, tools, furniture, bedding, clocks, looking-glass, -- and all thiswithout a sheriff or officer, in the face of the law for homestead exemptions,and without rendering to a single responsible person any account or reckoning.And such proceedings can happen, and will happen, in any community where aclass of ignorant toilers are placed by custom and race-prejudice beyond thepale of sympathy and race- brotherhood. So long as the best elements of acommunity do
Page 120
not feel in duty bound to protect and train and care for the weaker members oftheir group, they leave them to be preyed upon by these swindlers and rascals.
This unfortunate economic situation does not mean thehindrance of all advance in the black South, or the absence of a class of blacklandlords and mechanics who, in spite of disadvantages, are accumulatingproperty and making good citizens. But it does mean that this class is notnearly so large as a fairer economic system might easily make it, that thosewho survive in the competition are handicapped so as to accomplish much lessthan they deserve to, and that, above all, the personnel of thesuccessful class is left to chance and accident, and not to any intelligentculling or reasonable methods of selection. As a remedy for this, there is butone possible procedure. We must accept some of the race prejudice in the Southas a fact, -- deplorable in its intensity, unfortunate in results, anddangerous for the future, but nevertheless a hard fact which only time canefface. We cannot hope, then, in this generation, or for several generations,that the mass of the whites can be brought to assume that close sympathetic andself-sacrificing leadership of the blacks which their present situation soeloquently demands. Such leadership, such social teaching and example, mustcome from the blacks themselves. For some time men doubted as to whether theNegro could develop such leaders; but to-day no one seriously disputes thecapability of individual Negroes to assimilate the culture and common sense ofmodern civilization, and to pass it on, to some extent at least, to theirfellows. If this is true, then here is the path out of the economic situation,and here is the imperative demand for trained Negro leaders of character andintelligence, -- men of skill, men of light and leading, college-bred men,black captains of industry, and missionaries of culture; men who thoroughlycomprehend and know modern civilization, and can take hold of Negro communitiesand raise and train them by force of precept and example, deep sympathy, andthe inspiration of common blood and ideals. But if such men are to be effectivethey must have some power, -- they must be backed by the best public opinion ofthese communities, and
Page 121
able to wield for their objects and aims such weapons as the experience of theworld has taught are indispensable to hu- man progress.
Of such weapons the greatest, perhaps, in the modernworld is the power of the ballot; and this brings me to a consideration of thethird form of contact between whites and blacks in the South, -- politicalactivity.
In the attitude of the American mind toward Negrosuffrage can be traced with unusual accuracy the prevalent conceptions ofgovernment. In the fifties we were near enough the echoes of the FrenchRevolution to believe pretty thoroughly in universal suffrage. We argued, as wethought then rather logically, that no social class was so good, so true, andso disinterested as to be trusted wholly with the political destiny of itsneighbors; that in every state the best arbiters of their own welfare are thepersons directly affected; consequently that it is only by arming every handwith a ballot, -- with the right to have a voice in the policy of the state, --that the greatest good to the greatest number could be attained. To be sure,there were objections to these arguments, but we thought we had answered themtersely and convincingly; if some one complained of the ignorance of voters, weanswered, "Educate them." If another complained of their venality, wereplied, "Disfranchise them or put them in jail." And, finally, tothe men who feared demagogues and the natural perversity of some human beingswe insisted that time and bitter experience would teach the most hardheaded. Itwas at this time that the question of Negro suffrage in the South was raised.Here was a defenceless people suddenly made free. How were they to be protectedfrom those who did not believe in their freedom and were determined to thwartit? Not by force, said the North; not by government guardianship, said theSouth; then by the ballot, the sole and legitimate defence of a free people,said the Common Sense of the Nation. No one thought, at the time, that theex-slaves could use the ballot intelligently or very effectively; but they didthink that the possession of so great power by a great class in the nationwould compel their fellows to educate this class to its intelligent use.
Page 122
Meantime, new thoughts came to the nation: the inevitableperiod of moral retrogression and political trickery that ever follows in thewake of war overtook us. So flagrant became the political scandals thatreputable men began to leave politics alone, and politics consequently becamedisreputable. Men began to pride themselves on having nothing to do with theirown government, and to agree tacitly with those who regarded public office as aprivate perquisite. In this state of mind it became easy to wink at thesuppression of the Negro vote in the South, and to advise self-respectingNegroes to leave politics entirely alone. The decent and reputable citizens ofthe North who neglected their own civic duties grew hilarious over theexaggerated importance with which the Negro regarded the franchise. Thus iteasily happened that more and more the better class of Negroes followed theadvice from abroad and the pressure from home, and took no further interest inpolitics, leaving to the careless and the venal of their race the exercise oftheir rights as voters. The black vote that still remained was not trained andeducated, but further debauched by open and unblushing bribery, or force andfraud; until the Negro voter was thoroughly inoculated with the idea thatpolitics was a method of private gain by disreputable means.
And finally, now, to-day, when we are awakening to thefact that the perpetuity of republican institutions on this continent dependson the purification of the ballot, the civic training of voters, and theraising of voting to the plane of a solemn duty which a patriotic citizenneglects to his peril and to the peril of his children's children, -- in thisday, when we are striving for a renaissance of civic virtue, what are we goingto say to the black voter of the South? Are we going to tell him still thatpolitics is a disreputable and useless form of human activity? Are we going toinduce the best class of Negroes to take less and less interest in government,and to give up their right to take such an interest, without a protest? I amnot saying a word against all legitimate efforts to purge the ballot ofignorance, pauperism, and crime. But few have pretended that the presentmovement for disfranchisement in the South is for such a purpose; it has beenplainly and
Page 123
frankly declared in nearly every case that the object of the disfranchisinglaws is the elimination of the black man from politics.
Now, is this a minor matter which has no influence on themain question of the industrial and intellectual development of the Negro? Canwe establish a mass of black laborers and artisans and landholders in the Southwho, by law and public opinion, have absolutely no voice in shaping the lawsunder which they live and work? Can the modern organization of industry,assuming as it does free democratic government and the power and ability of thelaboring classes to compel respect for their welfare, -- can this system becarried out in the South when half its laboring force is voiceless in thepublic councils and powerless in its own defence? To-day the black man of theSouth has almost nothing to say as to how much he shall be taxed, or how thosetaxes shall be expended; as to who shall execute the laws, and how they shalldo it; as to who shall make the laws, and how they shall be made. It ispitiable that frantic efforts must be made at critical times to get law-makersin some States even to listen to the respectful presentation of the black man'sside of a current controversy. Daily the Negro is coming more and more to lookupon law and justice, not as protecting safeguards, but as sources ofhumiliation and oppression. The laws are made by men who have little interestin him; they are executed by men who have absolutely no motive for treating theblack people with courtesy or consideration; and, finally, the accusedlaw-breaker is tried, not by his peers, but too often by men who would ratherpunish ten innocent Negroes than let one guilty one escape.
I should be the last one to deny the patent weaknessesand shortcomings of the Negro people; I should be the last to withhold sympathyfrom the white South in its efforts to solve its intricate social problems. Ifreely acknowledged that it is possible, and sometimes best, that a partiallyundeveloped people should be ruled by the best of their stronger and betterneighbors for their own good, until such time as they can start and fight theworld's battles alone. I have already pointed out how sorely in need of sucheconomic and spiritual guidance
Page 124
the emancipated Negro was, and I am quite willing to admit that if therepresentatives of the best white Southern public opinion were the ruling andguiding powers in the South to-day the conditions indicated would be fairlywell fulfilled. But the point I have insisted upon and now emphasize again, isthat the best opinion of the South to-day is not the ruling opinion. That toleave the Negro helpless and without a ballot to-day is to leave him not to theguidance of the best, but rather to the exploitation and debauchment of theworst; that this is no truer of the South than of the North, -- of the Norththan of Europe: in any land, in any country under modern free competition, tolay any class of weak and despised people, be they white, black, or blue, atthe political mercy of their stronger, richer, and more resourceful fellows, isa temptation which human nature seldom has withstood and seldom will withstand.
Moreover, the political status of the Negro in the Southis closely connected with the question of Negro crime. There can be no doubtthat crime among Negroes has sensibly increased in the last thirty years, andthat there has appeared in the slums of great cities a distinct criminal classamong the blacks. In explaining this unfortunate development, we must note twothings: (1) that the inevitable result of Emancipation was to increase crimeand criminals, and (2) that the police system of the South was primarilydesigned to control slaves. As to the first point, we must not forget thatunder a strict slave system there can scarcely be such a thing as crime. Butwhen these variously constituted human particles are sud- denly thrownbroadcast on the sea of life, some swim, some sink, and some hang suspended, tobe forced up or down by the chance currents of a busy hurrying world. So greatan economic and social revolution as swept the South in '63 meant a weeding outamong the Negroes of the incompetents and vicious, the beginning of adifferentiation of social grades.
Now a rising group of people are not lifted bodily fromthe ground like an inert solid mass, but rather stretch upward like a livingplant with its roots still clinging in the mould. The appearance, therefore, ofthe Negro criminal was a phenomenon to be awaited; and while it causes anxiety,it should not occasion surprise.
Page 125
Here again the hope for the future depended peculiarly oncareful and delicate dealing with these criminals. Their offences at first werethose of laziness, carelessness, and im- pulse, rather than of malignity orungoverned viciousness. Such misdemeanors needed discriminating treatment, firmbut reformatory, with no hint of injustice, and full proof of guilt. For suchdealing with criminals, white or black, the South had no machinery, no adequatejails or reformatories; its police system was arranged to deal with blacksalone, and tacitly assumed that every white man was ipso facto a mem-ber of that police. Thus grew up a double system of justice, which erred on thewhite side by undue leniency and the practical immunity of red-handedcriminals, and erred on the black side by undue severity, injustice, and lackof discrimination. For, as I have said, the police system of the South wasoriginally designed to keep track of all Negroes, not simply of criminals; andwhen the Negroes were freed and the whole South was convinced of theimpossibility of free Negro labor, the first and almost universal device was touse the courts as a means of reenslaving the blacks. It was not then a questionof crime, but rather one of color, that settled a man's conviction on almostany charge. Thus Negroes came to look upon courts as instruments of injusticeand oppression, and upon those convicted in them as martyrs and victims.
When, now, the real Negro criminal appeared, and insteadof petty stealing and vagrancy we began to have highway robbery, burglary,murder, and rape, there was a curious effect on both sides the color-line: theNegroes refused to believe the evidence of white witnesses or the fairness ofwhite juries, so that the greatest deterrent to crime, the public opinion ofone's own social caste, was lost, and the criminal was looked upon as crucifiedrather than hanged. On the other hand, the whites, used to being careless as tothe guilt or innocence of accused Negroes, were swept in moments of passionbeyond law, reason, and decency. Such a situation is bound to increase crime,and has increased it. To natural viciousness and vagrancy are being daily addedmotives of revolt and revenge which stir up all the latent savagery of
Page 126
both races and make peaceful attention to economic de- velopment oftenimpossible.
But the chief problem in any community cursed with crimeis not the punishment of the criminals, but the preventing of the young frombeing trained to crime. And here again the peculiar conditions of the Southhave prevented proper precautions. I have seen twelve-year-old boys working inchains on the public streets of Atlanta, directly in front of the schools, incompany with old and hardened criminals; and this indiscriminate mingling ofmen and women and children makes the chain-gangs perfect schools of crime anddebauchery. The struggle for reformatories, which has gone on in Virginia,Georgia, and other States, is the one encouraging sign of the awakening of somecommunities to the suicidal results of this policy.
It is the public schools, however, which can be made,outside the homes, the greatest means of training decent self-respectingcitizens. We have been so hotly engaged recently in discussing trade-schoolsand the higher education that the pitiable plight of the public-school systemin the South has almost dropped from view. Of every five dollars spent forpublic education in the State of Georgia, the white schools get four dollarsand the Negro one dollar; and even then the white public-school system, save inthe cities, is bad and cries for reform. If this is true of the whites, what ofthe blacks? I am becoming more and more convinced, as I look upon the system ofcommon-school training in the South, that the national government must soonstep in and aid popular education in some way. To-day it has been only by themost strenuous efforts on the part of the thinking men of the South that theNegro's share of the school fund has not been cut down to a pittance in somehalf-dozen States; and that movement not only is not dead, but in manycommunities is gaining strength. What in the name of reason does this nationexpect of a people, poorly trained and hard pressed in severe economiccompetition, without political rights, and with ludicrously inadequatecommon-school facilities? What can it expect but crime and listlessness, offsethere and there by the dogged struggles of the fortunate and more determined who
Page 127
are themselves buoyed by the hope that in due time the country will come to itssenses?
I have thus far sought to make clear the physical,economic, and political relations of the Negroes and whites in the South, as Ihave conceived them, including, for the reasons set forth, crime and education.But after all that has been said on these more tangible matters of humancontact, there still remains a part essential to a proper description of theSouth which it is difficult to describe or fix in terms easily understood bystrangers. It is, in fine, the atmosphere of the land, the thought and feeling,the thousand and one little actions which go to make up life. In any communityor nation it is these little things which are most elusive to the grasp and yetmost essential to any clear conception of the group life taken as a whole. Whatis thus true of all communities is peculiarly true of the South, where, outsideof written history and outside of printed law, there has been going on for ageneration as deep a storm and stress of human souls, as intense a ferment offeeling, as intricate a writhing of spirit, as ever a people experienced.Within and without the sombre veil of color vast social forces have been atwork, -- efforts for human betterment, movements toward disintegration anddespair, tragedies and comedies in social and economic life, and a swaying andlifting and sinking of human hearts which have made this land a land of mingledsorrow and joy, of change and excitement and unrest.
The centre of this spiritual turmoil has ever been themillions of black freedmen and their sons, whose destiny is so fatefully boundup with that of the nation. And yet the casual observer visiting the South seesat first little of this. He notes the growing frequency of dark faces as herides along, -- but otherwise the days slip lazily on, the sun shines, and thislittle world seems as happy and contented as other worlds he has visited.Indeed, on the question of questions -- the Negro problem -- he hears so littlethat there almost seems to be a conspiracy of silence; the morning papersseldom mention it, and then usually in a far-fetched academic way, and indeedalmost every one seems to forget and ignore the darker half of the land, untilthe astonished visitor is inclined to ask if after
Page 128
all there is any problem here. But if he lingers long enough there comesthe awakening: perhaps in a sudden whirl of passion which leaves him gasping atits bitter intensity; more likely in a gradually dawning sense of things he hadnot at first noticed. Slowly but surely his eyes begin to catch the shadows ofthe color-line: here he meets crowds of Negroes and whites; then he is suddenlyaware that he cannot discover a single dark face; or again at the close of aday's wandering he may find himself in some strange assembly, where all facesare tinged brown or black, and where he has the vague, uncomfortable feeling ofthe stranger. He realizes at last that silently, resistlessly, the world aboutflows by him in two great streams: they ripple on in the same sunshine, theyapproach and mingle their waters in seeming carelessness, -- then they divideand flow wide apart. It is done quietly; no mistakes are made, or if oneoccurs, the swift arm of the law and of public opinion swings down for amoment, as when the other day a black man and a white woman were arrested fortalking together on Whitehall Street in Atlanta.
Now if one notices carefully one will see that betweenthese two worlds, despite much physical contact and daily intermingling, thereis almost no community of intellectual life or point of transference where thethoughts and feelings of one race can come into direct contact and sympathywith the thoughts and feelings of the other. Before and directly after the war,when all the best of the Negroes were domestic servants in the best of thewhite families, there were bonds of intimacy, affection, and sometimes bloodrelationship, between the races. They lived in the same home, shared in thefamily life, often attended the same church, and talked and conversed with eachother. But the increasing civilization of the Negro since then has naturallymeant the development of higher classes: there are increasing numbers ofministers, teachers, physicians, merchants, mechanics, and independent farmers,who by nature and training are the aristocracy and leaders of the blacks.Between them, however, and the best element of the whites, there is little orno intellectual com- merce. They go to separate churches, they live in separatesections, they are strictly separated in all public gatherings,
Page 129
they travel separately, and they are beginning to read different papers andbooks. To most libraries, lectures, concerts, and museums, Negroes are eithernot admitted at all, or on terms peculiarly galling to the pride of the veryclasses who might otherwise be attracted. The daily paper chronicles the doingsof the black world from afar with no great regard for accuracy; and so on,throughout the category of means for intellectual communication, -- schools,conferences, efforts for social betterment, and the like, -- it is usually truethat the very representatives of the two races, who for mutual benefit and thewelfare of the land ought to be in complete understanding and sympathy, are sofar strangers that one side thinks all whites are narrow and prejudiced, andthe other thinks educated Negroes dangerous and insolent. Moreover, in a landwhere the tyranny of public opinion and the intolerance of criticism is forobvious historical reasons so strong as in the South, such a situation isextremely difficult to correct.
The white man, as well as the Negro, is bound and barredby the color-line, and many a scheme of friendliness and philanthropy, ofbroad-minded sympathy and generous fellowship between the two has droppedstill-born because some busy- body has forced the color-question to the frontand brought the tremendous force of unwritten law against the innovators.
It is hardly necessary for me to add very much in regardto the social contact between the races. Nothing has come to replace that finersympathy and love between some masters and house servants which the radical andmore uncompromising drawing of the color-line in recent years has caused almostcompletely to disappear. In a world where it means so much to take a man by thehand and sit beside him, to look frankly into his eyes and feel his heartbeating with red blood; in a world where a social cigar or a cup of teatogether means more than legislative halls and magazine articles and speeches,-- one can imagine the consequences of the almost utter absence of such socialamenities between estranged races, whose separation extends even to parks andstreetcars.
Here there can be none of that social going down to thepeople, -- the opening of heart and hand of the best to the worst, in generousacknowledgment of a common humanity
Page 130
and a common destiny. On the other hand, in matters of simple almsgiving, wherethere can be no question of social contact, and in the succor of the aged andsick, the South, as if stirred by a feeling of its unfortunate limitations, isgenerous to a fault. The black beggar is never turned away without a good dealmore than a crust, and a call for help for the unfortunate meets quickresponse. I remember, one cold winter, in Atlanta, when I refrained fromcontributing to a public relief fund lest Negroes should be discriminatedagainst, I afterward inquired of a friend: "Were any black peoplereceiving aid?"
"Why," said he, "they were allblack."
And yet this does not touch the kernel of the problem.Human advancement is not a mere question of almsgiving, but rather of sympathyand cooperation among classes who would scorn charity. And here is a landwhere, in the higher walks of life, in all the higher striving for the good andnoble and true, the color-line comes to separate natural friends and coworkers;while at the bottom of the social group, in the saloon, the gambling-hell, andthe brothel, that same line wavers and disappears.
I have sought to paint an average picture of realrelations between the sons of master and man in the South. I have not glossedover matters for policy's sake, for I fear we have already gone too far in thatsort of thing. On the other hand, I have sincerely sought to let no unfairexaggerations creep in. I do not doubt that in some Southern communitiesconditions are better than those I have indicated; while I am no less certainthat in other communities they are far worse. Nor does the paradox and dangerof this situation fail to interest and perplex the best conscience of theSouth. Deeply religious and intensely democratic as are the mass of the whites,they feel acutely the false position in which the Negro problems place them.Such an essentially honest-hearted and generous people cannot cite thecaste-levelling precepts of Christianity, or believe in equality of opportunityfor all men, without coming to feel more and more with each generation that thepresent drawing of the color-line is a flat contradiction to their beliefs andprofessions. But just as often as they come to this point, the present socialcondition of the Negro
Page 131
stands as a menace and a portent before even the most open-minded: if therewere nothing to charge against the Negro but his blackness or other physicalpeculiarities, they argue, the problem would be comparatively simple; but whatcan we say to his ignorance, shiftlessness, poverty, and crime? can aself-respecting group hold anything but the least possible fellowship with suchpersons and survive? and shall we let a mawkish sentiment sweep away theculture of our fathers or the hope of our children? The argument so put is ofgreat strength, but it is not a whit stronger than the argument of thinkingNegroes: granted, they reply, that the condition of our masses is bad; there iscertainly on the one hand adequate historical cause for this, and unmistakableevidence that no small number have, in spite of tremendous disadvantages, risento the level of American civilization. And when, by proscription and prejudice,these same Negroes are classed with and treated like the lowest of theirpeople, simply because they are Negroes, such a policy not onlydiscourages thrift and intelligence among black men, but puts a direct premiumon the very things you complain of, -- inefficiency and crime. Draw lines ofcrime, of incompetency, of vice, as tightly and uncompromisingly as you will,for these things must be proscribed; but a color-line not only does notaccomplish this purpose, but thwarts it.
In the face of two such arguments, the future of theSouth depends on the ability of the representatives of these opposing views tosee and appreciate and sympathize with each other's position, -- for the Negroto realize more deeply than he does at present the need of uplifting the massesof his people, for the white people to realize more vividly than they have yetdone the deadening and disastrous effect of a color-prejudice that classesPhillis Wheatley and Sam Hose in the same despised class.
It is not enough for the Negroes to declare that color-prejudice is the sole cause of their social condition, nor for the white Southto reply that their social condition is the main cause of prejudice. They bothact as reciprocal cause and effect, and a change in neither alone will bringthe desired effect. Both must change, or neither can improve to any great
Page 132
extent. The Negro cannot stand the present reactionary ten- dencies andunreasoning drawing of the color-line indefinitely without discouragement andretrogression. And the condition of the Negro is ever the excuse for furtherdiscrimination. Only by a union of intelligence and sympathy across thecolor-line in this critical period of the Republic shall justice and righttriumph,
"That mind and soul according well,
May make one music as before,
But vaster."
Page 133
Dim face of Beauty haunting all the world,
Fair face of Beauty all too fair to see,
Where the lost stars adown the heavens are hurled, --
There, there alone for thee
May white peace be.
Beauty, sad face of Beauty, Mystery, Wonder,
What are these dreams to foolish babbling men
Who cry with little noises 'neath the thunder
Of Ages ground to sand,
To a little sand.
FIONA MACLEOD.
It was out in the country, far from home, far from myfoster home, on a dark Sunday night. The road wandered from our ramblinglog-house up the stony bed of a creek, past wheat and corn, until we could heardimly across the fields a rhythmic cadence of song, -- soft, thrilling,powerful, that swelled and died sorrowfully in our ears. I was a countryschoolteacher then, fresh from the East, and had never seen a Southern Negrorevival. To be sure, we in Berkshire were not perhaps as stiff and formal asthey in Suffolk of olden time; yet we were very quiet and subdued, and I knownot what would have happened those clear Sabbath mornings had some
Page 134
one punctuated the sermon with a wild scream, or interrupted the long prayerwith a loud Amen! And so most striking to me, as I approached the village andthe little plain church perched aloft, was the air of intense excitement thatpossessed that mass of black folk. A sort of suppressed terror hung in the airand seemed to seize us, -- a pythian madness, a demoniac possession, that lentterrible reality to song and word. The black and massive form of the preacherswayed and quivered as the words crowded to his lips and flew at us in singulareloquence. The people moaned and fluttered, and then the gaunt-cheeked brownwoman beside me suddenly leaped straight into the air and shrieked like a lostsoul, while round about came wail and groan and outcry, and a scene of humanpassion such as I had never conceived before.
Those who have not thus witnessed the frenzy of a Negrorevival in the untouched backwoods of the South can but dimly realize thereligious feeling of the slave; as described, such scenes appear grotesque andfunny, but as seen they are awful. Three things characterized this religion ofthe slave, -- the Preacher, the Music, and the Frenzy. The Preacher is the mostunique personality developed by the Negro on American soil. A leader, apolitician, an orator, a "boss," an intriguer, an idealist, -- allthese he is, and ever, too, the centre of a group of men, now twenty, now athousand in number. The combination of a certain adroitness with deepseatedearnestness, of tact with consummate ability, gave him his preeminence, andhelps him maintain it. The type, of course, varies according to time and place,from the West Indies in the sixteenth century to New England in the nineteenth,and from the Mississippi bottoms to cities like New Orleans or New York.
The Music of Negro religion is that plaintive rhythmicmelody, with its touching minor cadences, which, despite caricature anddefilement, still remains the most original and beautiful expression of humanlife and longing yet born on American soil. Sprung from the African forests,where its counterpart can still be heard, it was adapted, changed, andintensified by the tragic soul-life of the slave, until, under the stress oflaw and whip, it became the one true expression of a people's sorrow, despair,and hope.
Page 135
Finally the Frenzy of "Shouting," when theSpirit of the Lord passed by, and, seizing the devotee, made him mad withsupernatural joy, was the last essential of Negro religion and the one moredevoutly believed in than all the rest. It varied in expression from the silentrapt countenance or the low murmur and moan to the mad abandon of physicalfervor, -- the stamping, shrieking, and shouting, the rushing to and fro andwild waving of arms, the weeping and laughing, the vision and the trance. Allthis is nothing new in the world, but old as religion, as Delphi and Endor. Andso firm a hold did it have on the Negro, that many generations firmly believedthat without this visible manifestation of the God there could be no truecommunion with the Invisible.
These were the characteristics of Negro religious life asdeveloped up to the time of Emancipation. Since under the peculiarcircumstances of the black man's environment they were the one expression ofhis higher life, they are of deep interest to the student of his development,both socially and psychologically. Numerous are the attractive lines of inquirythat here group themselves. What did slavery mean to the African savage? Whatwas his attitude toward the World and Life? What seemed to him good and evil,-- God and Devil? Whither went his longings and strivings, and wherefore werehis heart-burnings and disappointments? Answers to such questions can come onlyfrom a study of Negro religion as a development, through its gradual changesfrom the heathenism of the Gold Coast to the institutional Negro church ofChicago.
Moreover, the religious growth of millions of men, eventhough they be slaves, cannot be without potent influence upon theircontemporaries. The Methodists and Baptists of America owe much of theircondition to the silent but potent influence of their millions of Negroconverts. Especially is this noticeable in the South, where theology andreligious philosophy are on this account a long way behind the North, and wherethe religion of the poor whites is a plain copy of Negro thought and methods.The mass of "gospel" hymns which has swept through American churchesand well-nigh ruined our sense of song consists largely of debased imitationsof Negro melodies made by ears that caught the jingle
Page 136
but not the music, the body but not the soul, of the Jubilee songs. It is thusclear that the study of Negro religion is not only a vital part of the historyof the Negro in America, but no uninteresting part of American history.
The Negro church of to-day is the social centre of Negrolife in the United States, and the most characteristic expression of Africancharacter. Take a typical church in a small Virginia town: it is the"First Baptist" -- a roomy brick edifice seating five hundred or morepersons, tastefully finished in Georgia pine, with a carpet, a small organ, andstained- glass windows. Underneath is a large assembly room with benches. Thisbuilding is the central club-house of a community of a thousand or moreNegroes. Various organizations meet here, -- the church proper, theSunday-school, two or three insurance societies, women's societies, secretsocieties, and mass meetings of various kinds. Entertainments, suppers, andlectures are held beside the five or six regular weekly religious services.Considerable sums of money are collected and expended here, employment is foundfor the idle, strangers are introduced, news is disseminated and charitydistributed. At the same time this social, intellectual, and economic centre isa religious centre of great power. Depravity, Sin, Redemption, Heaven, Hell,and Damnation are preached twice a Sunday after the crops are laid by; and fewindeed of the community have the hardihood to withstand conversion. Back ofthis more formal religion, the Church often stands as a real conserver ofmorals, a strengthener of family life, and the final authority on what is Goodand Right.
Thus one can see in the Negro church to-day, reproducedin microcosm, all the great world from which the Negro is cut off bycolor-prejudice and social condition. In the great city churches the sametendency is noticeable and in many respects emphasized. A great church like theBethel of Philadelphia has over eleven hundred members, an edifice seatingfifteen hundred persons and valued at one hundred thousand dollars, an annualbudget of five thousand dollars, and a government consisting of a pastor withseveral assisting local preachers, an executive and legislative board,financial boards and tax collectors; general church meetings for making laws;sub-divided groups led by class leaders, a company of militia,
Page 137
and twenty-four auxiliary societies. The activity of a church like this isimmense and far-reaching, and the bishops who preside over these organizationsthroughout the land are among the most powerful Negro rulers in the world.
Such churches are really governments of men, andconsequently a little investigation reveals the curious fact that, in theSouth, at least, practically every American Negro is a church member. Some, tobe sure, are not regularly enrolled, and a few do not habitually attendservices; but, practically, a proscribed people must have a social centre, andthat centre for this people is the Negro church. The census of 1890 showednearly twenty-four thousand Negro churches in the country, with a totalenrolled membership of over two and a half millions, or ten actual churchmembers to every twenty- eight persons, and in some Southern States one inevery two persons. Besides these there is the large number who, while notenrolled as members, attend and take part in many of the activities of thechurch. There is an organized Negro church for every sixty black families inthe nation, and in some States for every forty families, owning, on an average,a thousand dollars' worth of property each, or nearly twenty-six milliondollars in all.
Such, then, is the large development of the Negro churchsince Emancipation. The question now is, What have been the successive steps ofthis social history and what are the present tendencies? First, we must realizethat no such institution as the Negro church could rear itself without definitehistorical foundations. These foundations we can find if we remember that thesocial history of the Negro did not start in America. He was brought from adefinite social environment, -- the polygamous clan life under the headship ofthe chief and the potent influence of the priest. His religion wasnature-worship, with profound belief in invisible surrounding influences, goodand bad, and his worship was through incantation and sacrifice. The first rudechange in this life was the slave ship and the West Indian sugar-fields. Theplantation organization replaced the clan and tribe, and the white masterreplaced the chief with far greater and more despotic powers. Forced andlong-continued toil became the rule of life, the old ties of blood relationshipand kinship disappeared, and
Page 138
instead of the family appeared a new polygamy and polyandry, which, in somecases, almost reached promiscuity. It was a terrific social revolution, and yetsome traces were retained of the former group life, and the chief remaininginstitution was the Priest or Medicine-man. He early appeared on the plantationand found his function as the healer of the sick, the interpreter of theUnknown, the comforter of the sorrowing, the supernatural avenger of wrong, andthe one who rudely but picturesquely expressed the longing, disappointment, andresentment of a stolen and oppressed people. Thus, as bard, physician, judge,and priest, within the narrow limits allowed by the slave system, rose theNegro preacher, and under him the first church was not at first by any meansChristian nor definitely organized; rather it was an adaptation and mingling ofheathen rites among the members of each plantation, and roughly designated asVoodooism. Association with the masters, missionary effort and motives ofexpediency gave these rites an early veneer of Christianity, and after thelapse of many generations the Negro church became Christian.
Two characteristic things must be noticed in regard tothe church. First, it became almost entirely Baptist and Methodist in faith;secondly, as a social institution it antedated by many decades the monogamicNegro home. From the very circumstances of its beginning, the church wasconfined to the plantation, and consisted primarily of a series of disconnectedunits; although, later on, some freedom of movement was allowed, still thisgeographical limitation was always important and was one cause of the spread ofthe decentralized and democratic Baptist faith among the slaves. At the sametime, the visible rite of baptism appealed strongly to their mystictemperament. To-day the Baptist Church is still largest in membership amongNegroes, and has a million and a half communicants. Next in popularity came thechurches organized in connection with the white neighboring churches, chieflyBaptist and Methodist, with a few Episcopalian and others. The Methodists stillform the second greatest denomination, with nearly a million members. The faithof these two leading denominations was more suited to the slave church from theprominence they gave to religious feeling and fervor. The Negro membership inother denominations has always been
Page 139
small and relatively unimportant, although the Episcopalians and Presbyteriansare gaining among the more intelligent classes to-day, and the Catholic Churchis making headway in certain sections. After Emancipation, and still earlier inthe North, the Negro churches largely severed such affiliations as they had hadwith the white churches, either by choice or by compulsion. The Baptistchurches became independent, but the Methodists were compelled early to unitefor purposes of episcopal government. This gave rise to the great AfricanMethodist Church, the greatest Negro organization in the world, to the ZionChurch and the Colored Methodist, and to the black conferences and churches inthis and other denominations.
The second fact noted, namely, that the Negro churchantedates the Negro home, leads to an explanation of much that is paradoxicalin this communistic institution and in the morals of its members. Butespecially it leads us to regard this institution as peculiarly the expressionof the inner ethical life of a people in a sense seldom true elsewhere. Let usturn, then, from the outer physical development of the church to the moreimportant inner ethical life of the people who compose it. The Negro hasalready been pointed out many times as a religious animal, -- a being of thatdeep emotional nature which turns instinctively toward the supernatural.Endowed with a rich tropical imagination and a keen, delicate appreciation ofNature, the transplanted African lived in a world animate with gods and devils,elves and witches; full of strange influences, -- of Good to be implored, ofEvil to be propitiated. Slavery, then, was to him the dark triumph of Evil overhim. All the hateful powers of the Under-world were striving against him, and aspirit of revolt and revenge filled his heart. He called up all the resourcesof heathenism to aid, -- exorcism and witch-craft, the mysterious Obi worshipwith its barbarious rites, spells, and blood-sacrifice even, now and then, ofhuman victims. Weird midnight orgies and mystic conjurations were invoked, thewitch-woman and the voodoo-priest became the centre of Negro group life, andthat vein of vague superstition which characterizes the unlettered Negro evento-day was deepened and strengthened.
In spite, however, of such success as that of the fierce
Page 140
Maroons, the Danish blacks, and others, the spirit of revolt gradually diedaway under the untiring energy and superior strength of the slave masters. Bythe middle of the eighteenth century the black slave had sunk, with hushedmurmurs, to his place at the bottom of a new economic system, and wasunconsciously ripe for a new philosophy of life. Nothing suited his conditionthen better than the doctrines of passive submission embodied in the newlylearned Christianity. Slave masters early realized this, and cheerfully aidedreligious propaganda within certain bounds. The long system of repression anddegradation of the Negro tended to emphasize the elements of his characterwhich made him a valuable chattel: courtesy became humility, moral strengthdegenerated into submission, and the exquisite native appreciation of thebeautiful became an infinite capacity for dumb suffering. The Negro, losing thejoy of this world, eagerly seized upon the offered conceptions of the next; theavenging Spirit of the Lord enjoining patience in this world, under sorrow andtribulation until the Great Day when He should lead His dark children home, --this became his comforting dream. His preacher repeated the prophecy, and hisbards sang, --
"Children, we all shall be free
When the Lord shall appear!"
This deep religious fatalism, painted so beautifully in"Uncle Tom," came soon to breed, as all fatalistic faiths will, thesensualist side by side with the martyr. Under the lax moral life of theplantation, where marriage was a farce, laziness a virtue, and property atheft, a religion of resignation and submission degenerated easily, in lessstrenuous minds, into a philosophy of indulgence and crime. Many of the worstcharacteristics of the Negro masses of to-day had their seed in this period ofthe slave's ethical growth. Here it was that the Home was ruined under the veryshadow of the Church, white and black; here habits of shiftlessness took root,and sullen hopelessness replaced hopeful strife.
With the beginning of the abolition movement and thegradual growth of a class of free Negroes came a change. We often neglect theinfluence of the freedman before the war,
Page 141
because of the paucity of his numbers and the small weight he had in thehistory of the nation. But we must not forget that his chief influence wasinternal, -- was exerted on the black world; and that there he was the ethicaland social leader. Huddled as he was in a few centres like Philadelphia, NewYork, and New Orleans, the masses of the freedmen sank into poverty andlistlessness; but not all of them. The free Negro leader early arose and hischief characteristic was intense earnestness and deep feeling on the slaveryquestion. Freedom became to him a real thing and not a dream. His religionbecame darker and more intense, and into his ethics crept a note of revenge,into his songs a day of reckoning close at hand. The "Coming of theLord" swept this side of Death, and came to be a thing to be hoped for inthis day. Through fugitive slaves and irrepressible discussion this desire forfreedom seized the black millions still in bondage, and became their one idealof life. The black bards caught new notes, and sometimes even dared to sing, --
"O Freedom, O Freedom, O Freedom over me!
Before I'll be a slave
I'll be buried in my grave,
And go home to my Lord
And be free."
For fifty years Negro religion thus transformed itself andidentified itself with the dream of Abolition, until that which was a radicalfad in the white North and an anarchistic plot in the white South had become areligion to the black world. Thus, when Emancipation finally came, it seemed tothe freedman a literal Coming of the Lord. His fervid imagination was stirredas never before, by the tramp of armies, the blood and dust of battle, and thewail and whirl of social upheaval. He stood dumb and motionless before thewhirlwind: what had he to do with it? Was it not the Lord's doing, andmarvellous in his eyes? Joyed and bewildered with what came, he stood awaitingnew wonders till the inevitable Age of Reaction swept over the nation andbrought the crisis of to-day.
It is difficult to explain clearly the present criticalstage of
Page 142
Negro religion. First, we must remember that living as the blacks do in closecontact with a great modern nation, and sharing, although imperfectly, thesoul-life of that nation, they must necessarily be affected more or lessdirectly by all the religious and ethical forces that are to-day moving theUnited States. These questions and movements are, however, overshadowed anddwarfed by the (to them) all-important question of their civil, political, andeconomic status. They must perpetually discuss the "Negro Problem,"-- must live, move, and have their being in it, and interpret all else in itslight or darkness. With this come, too, peculiar problems of their inner life,-- of the status of women, the maintenance of Home, the training of children,the accumulation of wealth, and the prevention of crime. All this must mean atime of intense ethical ferment, of religious heart-searching and intellectualunrest. From the double life every American Negro must live, as a Negro and asan American, as swept on by the current of the nineteenth while yet strugglingin the eddies of the fifteenth century, -- from this must arise a painful self-consciousness, an almost morbid sense of personality and a moral hesitancywhich is fatal to self-confidence. The worlds within and without the Veil ofColor are changing, and changing rapidly, but not at the same rate, not in thesame way; and this must produce a peculiar wrenching of the soul, a peculiarsense of doubt and bewilderment. Such a double life, with double thoughts,double duties, and double social classes, must give rise to double words anddouble ideals, and tempt the mind to pretence or revolt, to hypocrisy orradicalism.
In some such doubtful words and phrases can one perhapsmost clearly picture the peculiar ethical paradox that faces the Negro ofto-day and is tingeing and changing his religious life. Feeling that his rightsand his dearest ideals are being trampled upon, that the public conscience isever more deaf to his righteous appeal, and that all the reactionary forces ofprejudice, greed, and revenge are daily gaining new strength and fresh allies,the Negro faces no enviable dilemma. Conscious of his impotence, andpessimistic, he often becomes bitter and vindictive; and his religion, insteadof a worship, is a complaint and a curse, a wail rather than a hope, a sneer
Page 143
rather than a faith. On the other hand, another type of mind, shrewder andkeener and more tortuous too, sees in the very strength of the anti-Negromovement its patent weaknesses, and with Jesuitic casuistry is deterred by noethical considerations in the endeavor to turn this weakness to the black man'sstrength. Thus we have two great and hardly reconcilable streams of thought andethical strivings; the danger of the one lies in anarchy, that of the other inhypocrisy. The one type of Negro stands almost ready to curse God and die, andthe other is too often found a traitor to right and a coward before force; theone is wedded to ideals remote, whimsical, perhaps impossible of realization;the other forgets that life is more than meat and the body more than raiment.But, after all, is not this simply the writhing of the age translated intoblack, -- the triumph of the Lie which today, with its false culture, faces thehideousness of the anarchist assassin?
To-day the two groups of Negroes, the one in the North,the other in the South, represent these divergent ethical tendencies, the firsttending toward radicalism, the other toward hypocritical compromise. It is noidle regret with which the white South mourns the loss of the old-time Negro,-- the frank, honest, simple old servant who stood for the earlier religiousage of submission and humility. With all his laziness and lack of many elementsof true manhood, he was at least open-hearted, faithful, and sincere. To-day heis gone, but who is to blame for his going? Is it not those very persons whomourn for him? Is it not the tendency, born of Reconstruction and Reaction, tofound a society on lawlessness and deception, to tamper with the moral fibre ofa naturally honest and straightforward people until the whites threaten tobecome ungovernable tyrants and the blacks criminals and hypocrites? Deceptionis the natural defence of the weak against the strong, and the South used itfor many years against its conquerors; to-day it must be prepared to see itsblack proletariat turn that same two-edged weapon against itself. And hownatural this is! The death of Denmark Vesey and Nat Turner proved long since tothe Negro the present hopelessness of physical defence. Political defence isbecoming less and less available, and economic defence is still only partiallyeffective. But there is a patent defence at hand, -- the
Page 144
defence of deception and flattery, of cajoling and lying. It is the samedefence which peasants of the Middle Age used and which left its stamp on theircharacter for centuries. To-day the young Negro of the South who would succeedcannot be frank and outspoken, honest and self-assertive, but rather he isdaily tempted to be silent and wary, politic and sly; he must flatter and bepleasant, endure petty insults with a smile, shut his eyes to wrong; in toomany cases he sees positive personal advantage in deception and lying. His realthoughts, his real aspirations, must be guarded in whispers; he must notcriticise, he must not complain. Patience, humility, and adroitness must, inthese growing black youth, replace impulse, manliness, and courage. With thissacrifice there is an economic opening, and perhaps peace and some prosperity.With- out this there is riot, migration, or crime. Nor is this situationpeculiar to the Southern United States, is it not rather the only method bywhich undeveloped races have gained the right to share modern culture? Theprice of culture is a Lie.
On the other hand, in the North the tendency is toemphasize the radicalism of the Negro. Driven from his birthright in the Southby a situation at which every fibre of his more outspoken and assertive naturerevolts, he finds himself in a land where he can scarcely earn a decent livingamid the harsh competition and the color discrimination. At the same time,through schools and periodicals, discussions and lectures, he is intellectuallyquickened and awakened. The soul, long pent up and dwarfed, suddenly expands innew-found freedom. What wonder that every tendency is to excess, -- radicalcomplaint, radical remedies, bitter denunciation or angry silence. Some sink,some rise. The criminal and the sensualist leave the church for thegambling-hell and the brothel, and fill the slums of Chicago and Baltimore; thebetter classes segregate themselves from the group-life of both white andblack, and form an aristocracy, cultured but pessimistic, whose bittercriticism stings while it points out no way of escape. They despise thesubmission and sub-serviency of the Southern Negroes, but offer no other meansby which a poor and oppressed minority can exist side by side with its masters.Feeling deeply and keenly the tendencies and opportunities of the age in whichthey live, their souls are
Page 145
bitter at the fate which drops the Veil between; and the very fact that thisbitterness is natural and justifiable only serves to intensify it and make itmore maddening.
Between the two extreme types of ethical attitude which Ihave thus sought to make clear wavers the mass of the millions of Negroes,North and South; and their religious life and activity partake of this socialconflict within their ranks. Their churches are differentiating, -- now intogroups of cold, fashionable devotees, in no way distinguishable from similarwhite groups save in color of skin; now into large social and businessinstitutions catering to the desire for information and amusement of theirmembers, warily avoiding unpleasant questions both within and without the blackworld, and preaching in effect if not in word: Dum vivimus, vivamus. Butback of this still broods silently the deep religious feeling of the real Negroheart, the stirring, unguided might of powerful human souls who have lost theguiding star of the past and seek in the great night a new religious ideal.Some day the Awakening will come, when the pent-up vigor of ten million soulsshall sweep irresistibly toward the Goal, out of the Valley of the Shadow ofDeath, where all that makes life worth living -- Liberty, Justice, and Right --is marked "For White People Only."
Page 146
O sister, sister, thy first-begotten,
The hands that cling and the feet that follow,
The voice of the child's blood crying yet,
Who hath remembered me? who hath forgotten?
Thou hast forgotten, O summer swallow,
But the world shall end when I forget.
SWINBURNE.
"Unto you a child is born," sang the bit ofyellow paper that fluttered into my room one brown October morning. Then thefear of fatherhood mingled wildly with the joy of creation; I wondered how itlooked and how it felt -- what were its eyes, and how its hair curled andcrumpled itself. And I thought in awe of her, -- she who had slept with Deathto tear a man-child from underneath her heart, while I was unconsciouslywandering. I fled to my wife and child, repeating the while to myself halfwonderingly, "Wife and child? Wife and child?" -- fled fast andfaster than boat and steam-car, and yet must ever impatiently await them; awayfrom the hard-voiced city, away
Page 147
from the flickering sea into my own Berkshire Hills that sit all sadly guardingthe gates of Massachusetts.
Up the stairs I ran to the wan mother and whimperingbabe, to the sanctuary on whose altar a life at my bidding had offered itselfto win a life, and won. What is this tiny formless thing, this newborn wailfrom an unknown world, -- all head and voice? I handle it curiously, and watchperplexed its winking, breathing, and sneezing. I did not love it then; itseemed a ludicrous thing to love; but her I loved, my girl-mother, she whom nowI saw unfolding like the glory of the morning -- the transfigured woman.Through her I came to love the wee thing, as it grew strong; as its little soulunfolded itself in twitter and cry and half-formed word, and as its eyes caughtthe gleam and flash of life. How beautiful he was, with his olive-tinted fleshand dark gold ringlets, his eyes of mingled blue and brown, his perfect littlelimbs, and the soft voluptuous roll which the blood of Africa had moulded intohis features! I held him in my arms, after we had sped far away from ourSouthern home, -- held him, and glanced at the hot red soil of Georgia and thebreathless city of a hundred hills, and felt a vague unrest. Why was his hairtinted with gold? An evil omen was golden hair in my life. Why had not thebrown of his eyes crushed out and killed the blue? -- for brown were hisfather's eyes, and his father's father's. And thus in the Land of theColor-line I saw, as it fell across my baby, the shadow of the Veil.
Within the Veil was he born, said I; and there withinshall he live, -- a Negro and a Negro's son. Holding in that little head -- ah,bitterly! -- he unbowed pride of a hunted race, clinging with that tiny dimpledhand -- ah, wearily! -- to a hope not hopeless but unhopeful, and seeing withthose bright wondering eyes that peer into my soul a land whose freedom is tous a mockery and whose liberty a lie. I saw the shadow of the Veil as it passedover my baby, I saw the cold city towering above the blood-red land. I held myface beside his little cheek, showed him the star-children and the twinklinglights as they began to flash, and stilled with an even-song the unvoicedterror of my life.
So sturdy and masterful he grew, so filled with bubblinglife, so tremulous with the unspoken wisdom of a life but
Page 148
eighteen months distant from the All-life, -- we were not far from worshippingthis revelation of the divine, my wife and I. Her own life builded and mouldeditself upon the child; he tinged her every dream and idealized her everyeffort. No hands but hers must touch and garnish those little limbs; no dressor frill must touch them that had not wearied her fingers; no voice but herscould coax him off to Dreamland, and she and he together spoke some soft andunknown tongue and in it held communion. I too mused above his little whitebed; saw the strength of my own arm stretched onward through the ages throughthe newer strength of his; saw the dream of my black fathers stagger a steponward in the wild phantasm of the world; heard in his baby voice the voice ofthe Prophet that was to rise within the Veil.
And so we dreamed and loved and planned by fall andwinter, and the full flush of the long Southern spring, till the hot windsrolled from the fetid Gulf, till the roses shivered and the still stern sunquivered its awful light over the hills of Atlanta. And then one night thelittle feet pattered wearily to the wee white bed, and the tiny hands trembled;and a warm flushed face tossed on the pillow, and we knew baby was sick. Tendays he lay there, -- a swift week and three endless days, wasting, wastingaway. Cheerily the mother nursed him the first days, and laughed into thelittle eyes that smiled again. Tenderly then she hovered round him, till thesmile fled away and Fear crouched beside the little bed.
Then the day ended not, and night was a dreamless terror,and joy and sleep slipped away. I hear now that Voice at midnight calling mefrom dull and dreamless trance, -- crying, "The Shadow of Death! TheShadow of Death!" Out into the starlight I crept, to rouse the grayphysician, -- the Shadow of Death, the Shadow of Death. The hours trembled on;the night listened; the ghastly dawn glided like a tired thing across thelamplight. Then we two alone looked upon the child as he turned toward us withgreat eyes, and stretched his stringlike hands, -- the Shadow of Death! And wespoke no word, and turned away.
He died at eventide, when the sun lay like a broodingsorrow above the western hills, veiling its face; when the winds spoke not, andthe trees, the great green trees he loved,
Page 149
stood motionless. I saw his breath beat quicker and quicker, pause, and thenhis little soul leapt like a star that travels in the night and left a world ofdarkness in its train. The day changed not; the same tall trees peeped in atthe windows, the same green grass glinted in the setting sun. Only in thechamber of death writhed the world's most piteous thing -- a childless mother.
I shirk not. I long for work. I pant for a life full ofstriving.
I am no coward, to shrink before the rugged rush of thestorm, nor even quail before the awful shadow of the Veil. But hearken, ODeath! Is not this my life hard enough, -- is not that dull land that stretchesits sneering web about me cold enough, -- is not all the world beyond thesefour little walls pitiless enough, but that thou must needs enter here, --thou, O Death? About my head the thundering storm beat like a heartless voice,and the crazy forest pulsed with the curses of the weak; but what cared I,within my home beside my wife and baby boy? Wast thou so jealous of one littlecoign of happiness that thou must needs enter there, -- thou, O Death?
A perfect life was his, all joy and love, with tears tomake it brighter, -- sweet as a summer's day beside the Housatonic. The worldloved him; the women kissed his curls, the men looked gravely into hiswonderful eyes, and the children hovered and fluttered about him. I can see himnow, chang- ing like the sky from sparkling laughter to darkening frowns, andthen to wondering thoughtfulness as he watched the world. He knew nocolor-line, poor dear -- and the Veil, though it shadowed him, had not yetdarkened half his sun. He loved the white matron, he loved his black nurse; andin his little world walked souls alone, uncolored and unclothed. I -- yea, allmen -- are larger and purer by the infinite breadth of that one little life.She who in simple clearness of vision sees beyond the stars said when he hadflown, "He will be happy There; he ever loved beautiful things." AndI, far more ignorant, and blind by the web of mine own weaving, sit alonewinding words and muttering, "If still he be, and he be There, and therebe a There, let him be happy, O Fate!"
Blithe was the morning of his burial, with bird and songand sweet-smelling flowers. The trees whispered to the grass,
Page 150
but the children sat with hushed faces. And yet it seemed a ghostly unreal day,-- the wraith of Life. We seemed to rum- ble down an unknown street behind alittle white bundle of posies, with the shadow of a song in our ears. The busycity dinned about us; they did not say much, those pale-faced hurrying men andwomen; they did not say much, -- they only glanced and said,"Niggers!"
We could not lay him in the ground there in Georgia, forthe earth there is strangely red; so we bore him away to the northward, withhis flowers and his little folded hands. In vain, in vain! -- for where, O God!beneath thy broad blue sky shall my dark baby rest in peace, -- where Reverencedwells, and Goodness, and a Freedom that is free?
All that day and all that night there sat an awfulgladness in my heart, -- nay, blame me not if I see the world thus darklythrough the Veil, -- and my soul whispers ever to me saying, "Not dead,not dead, but escaped; not bond, but free." No bitter meanness now shallsicken his baby heart till it die a living death, no taunt shall madden hishappy boyhood. Fool that I was to think or wish that this little soul shouldgrow choked and deformed within the Veil! I might have known that yonder deepunworldly look that ever and anon floated past his eyes was peering far beyondthis narrow Now. In the poise of his little curl-crowned head did there not sitall that wild pride of being which his father had hardly crushed in his ownheart? For what, forsooth, shall a Negro want with pride amid the studiedhumiliations of fifty million fellows? Well sped, my boy, before the world haddubbed your ambition insolence, had held your ideals unattainable, and taughtyou to cringe and bow. Better far this nameless void that stops my life than asea of sorrow for you.
Idle words; he might have borne his burden more bravelythan we, -- aye, and found it lighter too, some day; for surely, surely this isnot the end. Surely there shall yet dawn some mighty morning to lift the Veiland set the prisoned free. Not for me, -- I shall die in my bonds, -- but forfresh young souls who have not known the night and waken to the morning; amorning when men ask of the workman, not "Is he white?" but "Canhe work?" When men ask artists, not "Are they black?" but"Do they know?" Some morning this may be,
Page 151
long, long years to come. But now there wails, on that dark shore within theVeil, the same deep voice, Thou shalt forego! And all have I foregone atthat command, and with small complaint, -- all save that fair young form thatlies so coldly wed with death in the nest I had builded.
If one must have gone, why not I? Why may I not rest mefrom this restlessness and sleep from this wide waking? Was not the world'salembic, Time, in his young hands, and is not my time waning? Are there so manyworkers in the vineyard that the fair promise of this little body could lightlybe tossed away? The wretched of my race that line the alleys of the nation sitfatherless and unmothered; but Love sat beside his cradle, and in his earWisdom waited to speak. Perhaps now he knows the All-love, and needs not to bewise. Sleep, then, child, -- sleep till I sleep and waken to a baby voice andthe ceaseless patter of little feet -- above the Veil.
Page 152
Then from the Dawn it seemed there came, but faint
As from beyond the limit of the world,
Like the last echo born of a great cry,
Sounds, as if some fair city were one voice
Around a king returning from his wars.
TENNYSON.
This is the story of a human heart, -- the tale of a blackboy who many long years ago began to struggle with life that he might know theworld and know himself. Three temptations he met on those dark dunes that laygray and dismal before the wonder-eyes of the child: the temptation of Hate,that stood out against the red dawn; the temptation of Despair, that darkenednoonday; and the temptation of Doubt, that ever steals along with twilight.Above all, you must hear of the vales he crossed, -- the Valley of Humiliationand the Valley of the Shadow of Death.
I saw Alexander Crummell first at a Wilberforcecommencement season, amid its bustle and crush. Tall, frail, and
Page 153
black he stood, with simple dignity and an unmistakable air of good breeding. Italked with him apart, where the storming of the lusty young orators could notharm us. I spoke to him politely, then curiously, then eagerly, as I began tofeel the fineness of his character, -- his calm courtesy, the sweetness of hisstrength, and his fair blending of the hope and truth of life. Instinctively Ibowed before this man, as one bows before the prophets of the world. Some seerhe seemed, that came not from the crimson Past or the gray To-come, but fromthe pulsing Now, -- that mocking world which seemed to me at once so light anddark, so splendid and sordid. Fourscore years had he wandered in this sameworld of mine, within the Veil.
He was born with the Missouri Compromise and lay a-dyingamid the echoes of Manila and El Caney: stirring times for living, times darkto look back upon, darker to look forward to. The black-faced lad that pausedover his mud and marbles seventy years ago saw puzzling vistas as he lookeddown the world. The slave-ship still groaned across the Atlantic, faint criesburdened the Southern breeze, and the great black father whispered mad tales ofcruelty into those young ears. From the low doorway the mother silently watchedher boy at play, and at nightfall sought him eagerly lest the shadows bear himaway to the land of slaves.
So his young mind worked and winced and shaped curiouslya vision of Life; and in the midst of that vision ever stood one dark figurealone, -- ever with the hard, thick countenance of that bitter father, and aform that fell in vast and shapeless folds. Thus the temptation of Hate grewand shadowed the growing child, -- gliding stealthily into his laughter, fadinginto his play, and seizing his dreams by day and night with rough, rudeturbulence. So the black boy asked of sky and sun and flower the never-answeredWhy? and loved, as he grew, neither the world nor the world's rough ways.
Strange temptation for a child, you may think; and yet inthis wide land to-day a thousand thousand dark children brood before this sametemptation, and feel its cold and shuddering arms. For them, perhaps, some onewill some day lift the Veil, -- will come tenderly and cheerily into those sadlittle lives and brush the brooding hate away, just as Beriah
Page 154
Green strode in upon the life of Alexander Crummell. And before the bluff,kind-hearted man the shadow seemed less dark. Beriah Green had a school inOneida County, New York, with a score of mischievous boys. "I'm going tobring a black boy here to educate," said Beriah Green, as only a crank andan abolitionist would have dared to say. "Oho!" laughed the boys."Ye-es," said his wife; and Alexander came. Once before, the blackboy had sought a school, had travelled, cold and hungry, four hundred miles upinto free New Hampshire, to Canaan. But the godly farmers hitched ninety yokeof oxen to the abolition schoolhouse and dragged it into the middle of theswamp. The black boy trudged away.
The nineteenth was the first century of human sympathy,-- the age when half wonderingly we began to descry in others that transfiguredspark of divinity which we call Myself; when clodhoppers and peasants, andtramps and thieves, and millionaires and -- sometimes -- Negroes, becamethrobbing souls whose warm pulsing life touched us so nearly that we halfgasped with surprise, crying, "Thou too! Hast Thou seen Sorrow and thedull waters of Hopelessness? Hast Thou known Life?" And then allhelplessly we peered into those Other-worlds, and wailed, "O World ofWorlds, how shall man make you one?"
So in that little Oneida school there came to thoseschool- boys a revelation of thought and longing beneath one black skin, ofwhich they had not dreamed before. And to the lonely boy came a new dawn ofsympathy and inspiration. The shadowy, formless thing -- the temptation ofHate, that hovered between him and the world -- grew fainter and less sinister.It did not wholly fade away, but diffused itself and lingered thick at theedges. Through it the child now first saw the blue and gold of life, -- thesun-swept road that ran 'twixt heaven and earth until in one far-off wanwavering line they met and kissed. A vision of life came to the growing boy, --mystic, wonderful. He raised his head, stretched himself, breathed deep of thefresh new air. Yonder, behind the forests, he heard strange sounds; thenglinting through the trees he saw, far, far away, the bronzed hosts of a nationcalling, -- calling faintly, calling loudly. He heard the hateful clank oftheir chains; he felt them cringe and grovel, and
Page 155
there rose within him a protest and a prophecy. And he girded himself to walkdown the world.
A voice and vision called him to be a priest, -- a seerto lead the uncalled out of the house of bondage. He saw the headless host turntoward him like the whirling of mad waters, -- he stretched forth his handseagerly, and then, even as he stretched them, suddenly there swept across thevision the temptation of Despair.
They were not wicked men, -- the problem of life is notthe problem of the wicked, -- they were calm, good men, Bishops of theApostolic Church of God, and strove toward righteousness. They said slowly,"It is all very natural -- it is even commendable; but the GeneralTheological Seminary of the Episcopal Church cannot admit a Negro." Andwhen that thin, half-grotesque figure still haunted their doors, they put theirhands kindly, half sorrowfully, on his shoulders, and said, "Now, -- ofcourse, we -- we know how you feel about it; but you see it isimpossible, -- that is -- well -- it is premature. Sometime, we trust --sincerely trust -- all such distinc- tions will fade away; but now the world isas it is."
This was the temptation of Despair; and the young manfought it doggedly. Like some grave shadow he flitted by those halls, pleading,arguing, half angrily demanding admittance, until there came the finalNo: until men hustled the disturber away, marked him as foolish,unreasonable, and injudicious, a vain rebel against God's law. And then fromthat Vision Splendid all the glory faded slowly away, and left an earth grayand stern rolling on beneath a dark despair. Even the kind hands that stretchedthemselves toward him from out the depths of that dull morning seemed but partsof the purple shadows. He saw them coldly, and asked, "Why should I striveby special grace when the way of the world is closed to me?" All gentlyyet, the hands urged him on, -- the hands of young John Jay, that daringfather's daring son; the hands of the good folk of Boston, that free city. Andyet, with a way to the priesthood of the Church open at last before him, thecloud lingered there; and even when in old St. Paul's the venerable Bishopraised his white arms above the Negro deacon -- even then the burden had notlifted from that heart, for there had passed a glory from the earth.
Page 156
And yet the fire through which Alexander Crummell went did not burn in vain.Slowly and more soberly he took up again his plan of life. More critically hestudied the situation.
Deep down below the slavery and servitude of the Negropeople he saw their fatal weaknesses, which long years of mistreatment hademphasized. The dearth of strong moral character, of unbending righteousness,he felt, was their great shortcoming, and here he would begin. He would gatherthe best of his people into some little Episcopal chapel and there lead, teach,and inspire them, till the leaven spread, till the children grew, till theworld hearkened, till -- till -- and then across his dream gleamed some faintafter-glow of that first fair vision of youth -- only an after-glow, for therehad passed a glory from the earth.
One day -- it was in 1842, and the springtide wasstruggling merrily with the May winds of New England -- he stood at last in hisown chapel in Providence, a priest of the Church. The days sped by, and thedark young clergyman labored; he wrote his sermons carefully; he intoned hisprayers with a soft, earnest voice; he haunted the streets and accosted thewayfarers; he visited the sick, and knelt beside the dying. He worked andtoiled, week by week, day by day, month by month. And yet month by month thecongregation dwindled, week by week the hollow walls echoed more sharply, dayby day the calls came fewer and fewer, and day by day the third temptation satclearer and still more clearly within the Veil; a temptation, as it were, blandand smiling, with just a shade of mockery in its smooth tones. First it camecasually, in the cadence of a voice: "Oh, colored folks? Yes." Orperhaps more definitely: "What do you expect?" In voice andgesture lay the doubt -- the temptation of Doubt. How he hated it, and stormedat it furiously! "Of course they are capable," he cried; "ofcourse they can learn and strive and achieve -- " and "Ofcourse," added the temptation softly, "they do nothing of thesort." Of all the three temptations, this one struck the deepest. Hate? Hehad outgrown so childish a thing. Despair? He had steeled his right arm againstit, and fought it with the vigor of determination. But to doubt the worth ofhis life-work, -- to doubt the destiny and capability of the race his soulloved because it was his; to find listless
Page 157
squalor instead of eager endeavor; to hear his own lips whispering, "Theydo not care; they cannot know; they are dumb driven cattle, -- why cast yourpearls before swine?" -- this, this seemed more than man could bear; andhe closed the door, and sank upon the steps of the chancel, and cast his robeupon the floor and writhed.
The evening sunbeams had set the dust to dancing in thegloomy chapel when he arose. He folded his vestments, put away the hymn-books,and closed the great Bible. He stepped out into the twilight, looked back uponthe narrow little pulpit with a weary smile, and locked the door. Then hewalked briskly to the Bishop, and told the Bishop what the Bishop already knew."I have failed," he said simply. And gaining courage by theconfession, he added: "What I need is a larger constituency. There arecomparatively few Negroes here, and perhaps they are not of the best. I must gowhere the field is wider, and try again." So the Bishop sent him toPhiladelphia, with a letter to Bishop Onderdonk.
Bishop Onderdonk lived at the head of six white steps, --corpulent, red-faced, and the author of several thrilling tracts on ApostolicSuccession. It was after dinner, and the Bishop had settled himself for apleasant season of contemplation, when the bell must needs ring, and there mustburst in upon the Bishop a letter and a thin, ungainly Negro. Bishop Onderdonkread the letter hastily and frowned. Fortunately, his mind was already clear onthis point; and he cleared his brow and looked at Crummell. Then he said,slowly and impressively: "I will receive you into this diocese on onecondition: no Negro priest can sit in my church convention, and no Negro churchmust ask for representation there."
I sometimes fancy I can see that tableau: the frail blackfigure, nervously twitching his hat before the massive abdomen of BishopOnderdonk; his threadbare coat thrown against the dark woodwork of thebookcases, where Fox's "Lives of the Martyrs" nestled happily beside"The Whole Duty of Man." I seem to see the wide eyes of the Negrowander past the Bishop's broadcloth to where the swinging glass doors of thecabinet glow in the sunlight. A little blue fly is trying to cross the yawningkeyhole. He marches briskly up to it, peers into the chasm in a surprised sortof way, and rubs his feelers
Page 158
reflectively; then he essays its depths, and, finding it bottomless, draws backagain. The dark-faced priest finds himself wondering if the fly too has facedits Valley of Humiliation, and if it will plunge into it, -- when lo! itspreads its tiny wings and buzzes merrily across, leaving the watcher wing-less and alone.
Then the full weight of his burden fell upon him. Therich walls wheeled away, and before him lay the cold rough moor winding onthrough life, cut in twain by one thick granite ridge, -- here, the Valley ofHumiliation; yonder, the Valley of the Shadow of Death. And I know not which bedarker, -- no, not I. But this I know: in yonder Vale of the Humble standto-day a million swarthy men, who willingly would
" . . . bear the whips and scorns of time,
The oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely,
The pangs of despised love, the law's delay,
The insolence of office, and the spurns
That patient merit of the unworthy takes," --
all this and more would they bear did they but know thatthis were sacrifice and not a meaner thing. So surged the thought within thatlone black breast. The Bishop cleared his throat suggestively; then,recollecting that there was really nothing to say, considerately said nothing,only sat tapping his foot impatiently. But Alexander Crummell said, slowly andheavily: "I will never enter your diocese on such terms." And sayingthis, he turned and passed into the Valley of the Shadow of Death. You mighthave noted only the physical dying, the shattered frame and hacking cough; butin that soul lay deeper death than that. He found a chapel in New York, -- thechurch of his father; he labored for it in poverty and starvation, scorned byhis fellow priests. Half in despair, he wandered across the sea, a beggar withoutstretched hands. Englishmen clasped them, -- Wilberforce and Stanley,Thirwell and Ingles, and even Froude and Macaulay; Sir Benjamin Brodie bade himrest awhile at Queen's College in Cambridge, and there he lingered, strugglingfor health of body and mind, until he took his degree in '53. Restless still,and unsatisfied, he turned toward Africa, and for long years, amid
Page 159
the spawn of the slave-smugglers, sought a new heaven and a new earth.
So the man groped for light; all this was not Life, -- itwas the world-wandering of a soul in search of itself, the striving of one whovainly sought his place in the world, ever haunted by the shadow of a deaththat is more than death, -- the passing of a soul that has missed its duty.Twenty years he wandered, -- twenty years and more; and yet the hard raspingquestion kept gnawing within him, "What, in God's name, am I on earthfor?" In the narrow New York parish his soul seemed cramped and smothered.In the fine old air of the English University he heard the millions wailingover the sea. In the wild fever-cursed swamps of West Africa he stood helplessand alone.
You will not wonder at his weird pilgrimage, -- you whoin the swift whirl of living, amid its cold paradox and marvellous vision, havefronted life and asked its riddle face to face.
And if you find that riddle hard to read, remember thatyonder black boy finds it just a little harder; if it is difficult for you tofind and face your duty, it is a shade more difficult for him; if your heartsickens in the blood and dust of battle, remember that to him the dust isthicker and the battle fiercer. No wonder the wanderers fall! No wonder wepoint to thief and murderer, and haunting prostitute, and the never-endingthrong of unhearsed dead! The Valley of the Shadow of Death gives few of itspilgrims back to the world.
But Alexander Crummell it gave back. Out of thetemptation of Hate, and burned by the fire of Despair, triumphant over Doubt,and steeled by Sacrifice against Humiliation, he turned at last home across thewaters, humble and strong, gentle and determined. He bent to all the gibes andprejudices, to all hatred and discrimination, with that rare courtesy which isthe armor of pure souls. He fought among his own, the low, the grasping, andthe wicked, with that unbending righteousness which is the sword of the just.He never faltered, he seldom complained; he simply worked, inspiring the young,rebuking the old, helping the weak, guiding the strong.
So he grew, and brought within his wide influence allthat was best of those who walk within the Veil. They who live without knew notnor dreamed of that full power within, that
Page 160
mighty inspiration which the dull gauze of caste decreed that most men shouldnot know. And now that he is gone, I sweep the Veil away and cry, Lo! the soulto whose dear memory I bring this little tribute. I can see his face still,dark and heavy-lined beneath his snowy hair; lighting and shading, now withinspiration for the future, now in innocent pain at some human wickedness, nowwith sorrow at some hard memory from the past. The more I met AlexanderCrummell, the more I felt how much that world was losing which knew so littleof him. In another age he might have sat among the elders of the land inpurple-bordered toga; in another country mothers might have sung him to thecradles.
He did his work, -- he did it nobly and well; and yet Isorrow that here he worked alone, with so little human sym- pathy. His nameto-day, in this broad land, means little, and comes to fifty million ears ladenwith no incense of memory or emulation. And herein lies the tragedy of the age:not that men are poor, -- all men know something of poverty; not that men arewicked, -- who is good? not that men are ignorant, -- what is Truth? Nay, butthat men know so little of men.
He sat one morning gazing toward the sea. He smiled andsaid, "The gate is rusty on the hinges." That night at star- rise awind came moaning out of the west to blow the gate ajar, and then the soul Iloved fled like a flame across the Seas, and in its seat sat Death.
I wonder where he is to-day? I wonder if in that dimworld beyond, as he came gliding in, there rose on some wan throne a King, -- adark and pierced Jew, who knows the writhings of the earthly damned, saying, ashe laid those heart-wrung talents down, "Well done!" while roundabout the morning stars sat singing.
Page 161
What bring they 'neath the midnight,
Beside the River-sea?
They bring the human heart wherein
No nightly calm can be;
That droppeth never with the wind,
Nor drieth with the dew;
O calm it, God; thy calm is broad
To cover spirits too.
The river floweth on.
MRS. BROWNING.
Carlisle Street runs westward from the centre ofJohnstown, across a great black bridge, down a hill and up again, by littleshops and meat-markets, past single-storied homes, until suddenly it stopsagainst a wide green lawn. It is a broad, restful place, with two largebuildings outlined against the west. When at evening the winds come swellingfrom the east, and
Page 162
the great pall of the city's smoke hangs wearily above the valley, then the redwest glows like a dreamland down Carlisle Street, and, at the tolling of thesupper-bell, throws the passing forms of students in dark silhouette againstthe sky. Tall and black, they move slowly by, and seem in the sinister light toflit before the city like dim warning ghosts. Perhaps they are; for this isWells Institute, and these black students have few dealings with the white citybelow.
And if you will notice, night after night, there is onedark form that ever hurries last and late toward the twinkling lights of SwainHall, -- for Jones is never on time. A long, straggling fellow he is, brown andhard-haired, who seems to be growing straight out of his clothes, and walkswith a half- apologetic roll. He used perpetually to set the quiet dining-roominto waves of merriment, as he stole to his place after the bell had tapped forprayers; he seemed so perfectly awkward. And yet one glance at his face madeone forgive him much, -- that broad, good-natured smile in which lay no bit ofart or artifice, but seemed just bubbling good-nature and genuine satisfactionwith the world.
He came to us from Altamaha, away down there beneath thegnarled oaks of Southeastern Georgia, where the sea croons to the sands and thesands listen till they sink half drowned beneath the waters, rising only hereand there in long, low islands. The white folk of Altamaha voted John a goodboy, -- fine plough-hand, good in the rice-fields, handy everywhere, and alwaysgood-natured and respectful. But they shook their heads when his mother wantedto send him off to school. "It'll spoil him, -- ruin him," they said;and they talked as though they knew. But full half the black folk followed himproudly to the station, and carried his queer little trunk and many bundles.And there they shook and shook hands, and the girls kissed him shyly and theboys clapped him on the back. So the train came, and he pinched his littlesister lovingly, and put his great arms about his mother's neck, and then wasaway with a puff and a roar into the great yellow world that flamed and flaredabout the doubtful pilgrim. Up the coast they hurried, past the squares andpalmettos of Savannah, through the cotton-fields and
Page 163
through the weary night, to Millville, and came with the morning to the noiseand bustle of Johnstown.
And they that stood behind, that morning in Altamaha, andwatched the train as it noisily bore playmate and brother and son away to theworld, had thereafter one ever-recurring word, -- "When John comes."Then what parties were to be, and what speakings in the churches; what newfurniture in the front room, -- perhaps even a new front room; and there wouldbe a new schoolhouse, with John as teacher; and then perhaps a big wedding; allthis and more -- when John comes. But the white people shook their heads.
At first he was coming at Christmas-time, -- but thevacation proved too short; and then, the next summer, -- but times were hardand schooling costly, and so, instead, he worked in Johnstown. And so itdrifted to the next summer, and the next, -- till playmates scattered, andmother grew gray, and sister went up to the Judge's kitchen to work. And stillthe legend lingered, -- "When John comes."
Up at the Judge's they rather liked this refrain; forthey too had a John -- a fair-haired, smooth-faced boy, who had played many along summer's day to its close with his darker namesake. "Yes, sir! Johnis at Princeton, sir," said the broad-shouldered gray-haired Judge everymorning as he marched down to the post-office. "Showing the Yankees what aSouthern gentleman can do," he added; and strode home again with hisletters and papers. Up at the great pillared house they lingered long over thePrinceton letter, -- the Judge and his frail wife, his sister and growingdaughters. "It'll make a man of him," said the Judge, "collegeis the place." And then he asked the shy little waitress, "Well,Jennie, how's your John?" and added reflectively, "Too bad, too badyour mother sent him off -- it will spoil him." And the waitress wondered.
Thus in the far-away Southern village the world laywaiting, half consciously, the coming of two young men, and dreamed in aninarticulate way of new things that would be done and new thoughts that allwould think. And yet it was singular that few thought of two Johns, -- for theblack folk thought of one John, and he was black; and the white folk thought of
Page 164
another John, and he was white. And neither world thought the other world'sthought, save with a vague unrest.
Up in Johnstown, at the Institute, we were long puzzledat the case of John Jones. For a long time the clay seemed unfit for any sortof moulding. He was loud and boisterous, always laughing and singing, and neverable to work consecutively at anything. He did not know how to study; he had noidea of thoroughness; and with his tardiness, carelessness, and appall- inggood-humor, we were sore perplexed. One night we sat in faculty-meeting,worried and serious; for Jones was in trouble again. This last escapade was toomuch, and so we solemnly voted "that Jones, on account of repeateddisorder and inattention to work, be suspended for the rest of the term."
It seemed to us that the first time life ever struckJones as a really serious thing was when the Dean told him he must leaveschool. He stared at the gray-haired man blankly, with great eyes. "Why,-- why," he faltered, "but -- I haven't graduated!" Then theDean slowly and clearly explained, reminding him of the tardiness and thecarelessness, of the poor lessons and neglected work, of the noise anddisorder, until the fellow hung his head in confusion. Then he said quickly,"But you won't tell mammy and sister, -- you won't write mammy, now willyou? For if you won't I'll go out into the city and work, and come back nextterm and show you something." So the Dean promised faithfully, and Johnshouldered his little trunk, giving neither word nor look to the giggling boys,and walked down Carlisle Street to the great city, with sober eyes and a setand serious face.
Perhaps we imagined it, but someway it seemed to us thatthe serious look that crept over his boyish face that afternoon never left itagain. When he came back to us he went to work with all his rugged strength. Itwas a hard struggle, for things did not come easily to him, -- few crowdingmemories of early life and teaching came to help him on his new way; but allthe world toward which he strove was of his own building, and he builded slowand hard. As the light dawned lingeringly on his new creations, he sat rapt andsilent before the vision, or wandered alone over the green campus peeringthrough and beyond the world of men into a world of thought. And the thoughtsat times puzzled him sorely; he could not
Page 165
see just why the circle was not square, and carried it out fifty-six decimalplaces one midnight, -- would have gone further, indeed, had not the matronrapped for lights out. He caught terrible colds lying on his back in themeadows of nights, trying to think out the solar system; he had grave doubts asto the ethics of the Fall of Rome, and strongly suspected the Germans of beingthieves and rascals, despite his textbooks; he pondered long over every newGreek word, and wondered why this meant that and why it couldn't mean somethingelse, and how it must have felt to think all things in Greek. So he thought andpuzzled along for himself, -- pausing perplexed where others skipped merrily,and walking steadily through the difficulties where the rest stopped andsurrendered.
Thus he grew in body and soul, and with him his clothesseemed to grow and arrange themselves; coat sleeves got longer, cuffs appeared,and collars got less soiled. Now and then his boots shone, and a new dignitycrept into his walk. And we who saw daily a new thoughtfulness growing in hiseyes began to expect something of this plodding boy. Thus he passed out of thepreparatory school into college, and we who watched him felt four more years ofchange, which almost transformed the tall, grave man who bowed to uscommencement morning. He had left his queer thought-world and come back to aworld of motion and of men. He looked now for the first time sharply about him,and wondered he had seen so little before. He grew slowly to feel almost forthe first time the Veil that lay between him and the white world; he firstnoticed now the oppression that had not seemed oppression before, differencesthat erstwhile seemed natural, restraints and slights that in his boyhood dayshad gone unnoticed or been greeted with a laugh. He felt angry now when men didnot call him "Mister," he clenched his hands at the "JimCrow" cars, and chafed at the color-line that hemmed in him and his. Atinge of sarcasm crept into his speech, and a vague bitterness into his life;and he sat long hours wondering and planning a way around these crooked things.Daily he found himself shrinking from the choked and narrow life of his nativetown. And yet he always planned to go back to Altamaha, -- always planned towork there. Still, more and
Page 166
more as the day approached he hesitated with a nameless dread; and even the dayafter graduation he seized with eagerness the offer of the Dean to send himNorth with the quartette during the summer vacation, to sing for the Institute.A breath of air before the plunge, he said to himself in half apology.
It was a bright September afternoon, and the streets ofNew York were brilliant with moving men. They reminded John of the sea, as hesat in the square and watched them, so changelessly changing, so bright anddark, so grave and gay. He scanned their rich and faultless clothes, the waythey carried their hands, the shape of their hats; he peered into the hurryingcarriages. Then, leaning back with a sigh, he said, "This is theWorld." The notion suddenly seized him to see where the world was going;since many of the richer and brighter seemed hurrying all one way. So when atall, light-haired young man and a little talkative lady came by, he rose halfhesitatingly and followed them. Up the street they went, past stores and gayshops, across a broad square, until with a hundred others they entered the highportal of a great building.
He was pushed toward the ticket-office with the others,and felt in his pocket for the new five-dollar bill he had hoarded. Thereseemed really no time for hesitation, so he drew it bravely out, passed it tothe busy clerk, and received simply a ticket but no change. When at last herealized that he had paid five dollars to enter he knew not what, he stoodstockstill amazed. "Be careful," said a low voice behind him;"you must not lynch the colored gentleman simply because he's in yourway," and a girl looked up roguishly into the eyes of her fair-hairedescort. A shade of annoyance passed over the escort's face. "Youwill not understand us at the South," he said half impatiently, asif continuing an argument. "With all your professions, one never sees inthe North so cordial and intimate relations between white and black as areeveryday occurrences with us. Why, I remember my closest playfellow in boyhoodwas a little Negro named after me, and surely no two, -- well!" Theman stopped short and flushed to the roots of his hair, for there directlybeside his reserved orchestra chairs sat the Negro he had stumbled over in thehallway. He
Page 167
hesitated and grew pale with anger, called the usher and gave him his card,with a few peremptory words, and slowly sat down. The lady deftly changed thesubject.
All this John did not see, for he sat in a half-dazeminding the scene about him; the delicate beauty of the hall, the faintperfume, the moving myriad of men, the rich clothing and low hum of talkingseemed all a part of a world so different from his, so strangely more beautifulthan anything he had known, that he sat in dreamland, and started when, after ahush, rose high and clear the music of Lohengrin's swan. The infinite beauty ofthe wail lingered and swept through every muscle of his frame, and put it alla-tune. He closed his eyes and grasped the elbows of the chair, touchingunwittingly the lady's arm. And the lady drew away. A deep longing swelled inall his heart to rise with that clear music out of the dirt and dust of thatlow life that held him prisoned and befouled. If he could only live up in thefree air where birds sang and setting suns had no touch of blood! Who hadcalled him to be the slave and butt of all? And if he had called, what righthad he to call when a world like this lay open before men?
Then the movement changed, and fuller, mightier harmonyswelled away. He looked thoughtfully across the hall, and wondered why thebeautiful gray-haired woman looked so listless, and what the little man couldbe whispering about. He would not like to be listless and idle, he thought, forhe felt with the music the movement of power within him. If he but had somemaster-work, some life-service, hard, -- aye, bitter hard, but without thecringing and sickening servility, without the cruel hurt that hardened hisheart and soul. When at last a soft sorrow crept across the violins, there cameto him the vision of a far-off home, the great eyes of his sister, and the darkdrawn face of his mother. And his heart sank below the waters, even as thesea-sand sinks by the shores of Altamaha, only to be lifted aloft again withthat last ethereal wail of the swan that quivered and faded away into the sky.
It left John sitting so silent and rapt that he did notfor some time notice the usher tapping him lightly on the shoulder and sayingpolitely, "Will you step this way, please, sir?" A little surprised,he arose quickly at the last tap, and, turning to leave his seat, looked fullinto the face of the fair-haired
Page 168
young man. For the first time the young man recognized his dark boyhoodplaymate, and John knew that it was the Judge's son. The White John started,lifted his hand, and then froze into his chair; the black John smiled lightly,then grimly, and followed the usher down the aisle. The manager was sorry,very, very sorry, -- but he explained that some mistake had been made inselling the gentleman a seat already disposed of; he would refund the money, ofcourse, -- and indeed felt the matter keenly, and so forth, and -- before hehad finished John was gone, walking hurriedly across the square and down thebroad streets, and as he passed the park he buttoned his coat and said,"John Jones, you're a natural-born fool." Then he went to hislodgings and wrote a letter, and tore it up; he wrote another, and threw it inthe fire. Then he seized a scrap of paper and wrote: "Dear Mother andSister -- I am coming -- John."
"Perhaps," said John, as he settled himself onthe train, "perhaps I am to blame myself in struggling against my manifestdestiny simply because it looks hard and unpleasant. Here is my duty toAltamaha plain before me; perhaps they'll let me help settle the Negro problemsthere, -- perhaps they won't. 'I will go in to the King, which is not accordingto the law; and if I perish, I perish.'" And then he mused and dreamed,and planned a life-work; and the train flew south.
Down in Altamaha, after seven long years, all the worldknew John was coming. The homes were scrubbed and scoured, -- above all, one;the gardens and yards had an unwonted trimness, and Jennie bought a newgingham. With some finesse and negotiation, all the dark Methodists andPresbyterians were induced to join in a monster welcome at the Baptist Church;and as the day drew near, warm discussions arose on every corner as to theexact extent and nature of John's accomplishments. It was noontide on a grayand cloudy day when he came. The black town flocked to the depot, with a littleof the white at the edges, -- a happy throng, with "Good- mawnings"and "Howdys" and laughing and joking and jostling. Mother sat yonderin the window watching; but sister Jennie stood on the platform, nervouslyfingering her dress, tall and lithe, with soft brown skin and loving eyespeering from out a tangled wilderness of hair. John rose
Page 169
gloomily as the train stopped, for he was thinking of the "Jim Crow"car; he stepped to the platform, and paused: a little dingy station, a blackcrowd gaudy and dirty, a half-mile of dilapidated shanties along a stragglingditch of mud. An overwhelming sense of the sordidness and narrowness of it allseized him; he looked in vain for his mother, kissed coldly the tall, strangegirl who called him brother, spoke a short, dry word here and there; then,lingering neither for hand- shaking nor gossip, started silently up the street,raising his hat merely to the last eager old aunty, to her open-mouthedastonishment. The people were distinctly bewildered. This silent, cold man, --was this John? Where was his smile and hearty hand-grasp? "'Peared kind o'down in the mouf," said the Methodist preacher thoughtfully. "Seemedmonstus stuck up," complained a Baptist sister. But the white post- masterfrom the edge of the crowd expressed the opinion of his folks plainly."That damn Nigger," said he, as he shouldered the mail and arrangedhis tobacco, "has gone North and got plum full o' fool notions; but theywon't work in Altamaha." And the crowd melted away.
The meeting of welcome at the Baptist Church was afailure. Rain spoiled the barbecue, and thunder turned the milk in theice-cream. When the speaking came at night, the house was crowded tooverflowing. The three preachers had especially prepared themselves, butsomehow John's manner seemed to throw a blanket over everything, -- he seemedso cold and preoccupied, and had so strange an air of restraint that theMethodist brother could not warm up to his theme and elicited not a single"Amen"; the Presbyterian prayer was but feebly responded to, and eventhe Baptist preacher, though he wakened faint enthusiasm, got so mixed up inhis favorite sentence that he had to close it by stopping fully fifteen minutessooner than he meant. The people moved uneasily in their seats as John rose toreply. He spoke slowly and methodically. The age, he said, demanded new ideas;we were far different from those men of the seventeenth and eighteenthcenturies, -- with broader ideas of human brotherhood and destiny. Then hespoke of the rise of charity and popular education, and particularly of thespread of wealth and work. The question was, then, he added reflectively,
Page 170
looking at the low discolored ceiling, what part the Negroes of this land wouldtake in the striving of the new century. He sketched in vague outline the newIndustrial School that might rise among these pines, he spoke in detail of thecharitable and philanthropic work that might be organized, of money that mightbe saved for banks and business. Finally he urged unity, and deprecatedespecially religious and denominational bickering. "To-day," he said,with a smile, "the world cares little whether a man be Baptist orMethodist, or indeed a churchman at all, so long as he is good and true. Whatdifference does it make whether a man be baptized in river or washbowl, or notat all? Let's leave all that littleness, and look higher." Then, thinkingof nothing else, he slowly sat down. A painful hush seized that crowded mass.Little had they understood of what he said, for he spoke an un- known tongue,save the last word about baptism; that they knew, and they sat very still whilethe clock ticked. Then at last a low suppressed snarl came from the Amencorner, and an old bent man arose, walked over the seats, and climbed straightup into the pulpit. He was wrinkled and black, with scant gray and tufted hair;his voice and hands shook as with palsy; but on his face lay the intense raptlook of the religious fanatic. He seized the Bible with his rough, huge hands;twice he raised it inarticulate, and then fairly burst into words, with rudeand awful eloquence. He quivered, swayed, and bent; then rose aloft in perfectmajesty, till the people moaned and wept, wailed and shouted, and a wildshrieking arose from the corners where all the pent-up feeling of the hourgathered itself and rushed into the air. John never knew clearly what the oldman said; he only felt himself held up to scorn and scathing denunciation fortrampling on the true Religion, and he realized with amazement that all unknow-ingly he had put rough, rude hands on something this little world held sacred.He arose silently, and passed out into the night. Down toward the sea he went,in the fitful starlight, half conscious of the girl who followed timidly afterhim. When at last he stood upon the bluff, he turned to his little sister andlooked upon her sorrowfully, remembering with sudden pain how little thought hehad given her. He put his
Page 171
arm about her and let her passion of tears spend itself on his shoulder.
Long they stood together, peering over the gray unrestingwater.
"John," she said, "does it make every one-- unhappy when they study and learn lots of things?"
He paused and smiled. "I am afraid it does," hesaid. "And, John, are you glad you studied?"
"Yes," came the answer, slowly but positively.
She watched the flickering lights upon the sea, and saidthoughtfully, "I wish I was unhappy, -- and -- and," putting botharms about his neck, "I think I am, a little, John."
It was several days later that John walked up to theJudge's house to ask for the privilege of teaching the Negro school. The Judgehimself met him at the front door, stared a little hard at him, and saidbrusquely, "Go 'round to the kitchen door, John, and wait." Sittingon the kitchen steps, John stared at the corn, thoroughly perplexed. What onearth had come over him? Every step he made offended some one. He had come tosave his people, and before he left the depot he had hurt them. He sought toteach them at the church, and had outraged their deepest feelings. He hadschooled himself to be respectful to the Judge, and then blundered into hisfront door. And all the time he had meant right, -- and yet, and yet, somehowhe found it so hard and strange to fit his old surroundings again, to find hisplace in the world about him. He could not remember that he used to have anydifficulty in the past, when life was glad and gay. The world seemed smooth andeasy then. Perhaps, -- but his sister came to the kitchen door just then andsaid the Judge awaited him.
The Judge sat in the dining-room amid his morning's mail,and he did not ask John to sit down. He plunged squarely into the business."You've come for the school, I suppose. Well John, I want to speak to youplainly. You know I'm a friend to your people. I've helped you and your family,and would have done more if you hadn't got the notion of going off. Now I likethe colored people, and sympathize with all their reasonable aspirations; butyou and I both know, John, that in this country the Negro must remainsubordinate, and can never expect to be the equal of white men. In their place,
Page 172
your people can be honest and respectful; and God knows, I'll do what I can tohelp them. But when they want to reverse nature, and rule white men, and marrywhite women, and sit in my parlor, then, by God! we'll hold them under if wehave to lynch every Nigger in the land. Now, John, the question is, are you,with your education and Northern notions, going to accept the situation andteach the darkies to be faithful servants and laborers as your fathers were, --I knew your father, John, he belonged to my brother, and he was a good Nigger.Well -- well, are you going to be like him, or are you going to try to put foolideas of rising and equality into these folks' heads, and make themdiscontented and unhappy?"
"I am going to accept the situation, JudgeHenderson," answered John, with a brevity that did not escape the keen oldman. He hesitated a moment, and then said shortly, "Very well, -- we'lltry you awhile. Good-morning."
It was a full month after the opening of the Negro schoolthat the other John came home, tall, gay, and headstrong. The mother wept, thesisters sang. The whole white town was glad. A proud man was the Judge, and itwas a goodly sight to see the two swinging down Main Street together. And yetall did not go smoothly between them, for the younger man could not and did notveil his contempt for the little town, and plainly had his heart set on NewYork. Now the one cherished ambition of the Judge was to see his son mayor ofAltamaha, representative to the legislature, and -- who could say? -- governorof Georgia. So the argument often waxed hot between them. "Good heavens,father," the younger man would say after dinner, as he lighted a cigar andstood by the fireplace, "you surely don't expect a young fellow like me tosettle down permanently in this -- this God-forgotten town with nothing but mudand Negroes?" "I did," the Judge would answer laconically; andon this particular day it seemed from the gathering scowl that he was about toadd something more emphatic, but neighbors had already begun to drop in toadmire his son, and the conversation drifted.
"Heah that John is livenin' things up at the darkyschool," volunteered the postmaster, after a pause.
"What now?" asked the Judge, sharply.
"Oh, nothin' in particulah, -- just his almighty airand up-
Page 173
pish ways. B'lieve I did heah somethin' about his givin' talks on the FrenchRevolution, equality, and such like. He's what I call a dangerous Nigger."
"Have you heard him say anything out of theway?"
"Why, no, -- but Sally, our girl, told my wife a lotof rot. Then, too, I don't need to heah: a Nigger what won't say 'sir' to awhite man, or -- "
"Who is this John?" interrupted the son.
"Why, it's little black John, Peggy's son, -- yourold playfellow."
The young man's face flushed angrily, and then helaughed.
"Oh," said he, "it's the darky that triedto force himself into a seat beside the lady I was escorting -- "
But Judge Henderson waited to hear no more. He had beennettled all day, and now at this he rose with a half-smothered oath, took hishat and cane, and walked straight to the schoolhouse.
For John, it had been a long, hard pull to get thingsstarted in the rickety old shanty that sheltered his school. The Negroes wererent into factions for and against him, the parents were careless, the childrenirregular and dirty, and books, pencils, and slates largely missing.Nevertheless, he struggled hopefully on, and seemed to see at last someglimmering of dawn. The attendance was larger and the children were a shadecleaner this week. Even the booby class in reading showed a little comfortingprogress. So John settled himself with renewed patience this afternoon.
"Now, Mandy," he said cheerfully, "that'sbetter; but you mustn't chop your words up so: 'If -- the-man -- goes.' Why,your little brother even wouldn't tell a story that way, now would he?"
"Naw, suh, he cain't talk."
"All right; now let's try again: 'If the man -- '
"John!"
The whole school started in surprise, and the teacherhalf arose, as the red, angry face of the Judge appeared in the open doorway.
"John, this school is closed. You children can gohome and get to work. The white people of Altamaha are not spending their moneyon black folks to have their heads
Page 174
crammed with impudence and lies. Clear out! I'll lock the door myself."
Up at the great pillared house the tall young sonwandered aimlessly about after his father's abrupt departure. In the housethere was little to interest him; the books were old and stale, the localnewspaper flat, and the women had retired with headaches and sewing. He tried anap, but it was too warm. So he sauntered out into the fields, complainingdisconsolately, "Good Lord! how long will this imprisonment last!" Hewas not a bad fellow, -- just a little spoiled and self-indulgent, and asheadstrong as his proud father. He seemed a young man pleasant to look upon, ashe sat on the great black stump at the edge of the pines idly swinging his legsand smoking. "Why, there isn't even a girl worth getting up a respectableflirtation with," he growled. Just then his eye caught a tall, willowyfigure hurrying toward him on the narrow path. He looked with interest atfirst, and then burst into a laugh as he said, "Well, I declare, if itisn't Jennie, the little brown kitchen-maid! Why, I never noticed before what atrim little body she is. Hello, Jennie! Why, you haven't kissed me since I camehome," he said gaily. The young girl stared at him in surprise andconfusion, -- faltered something inarticulate, and attempted to pass. But awilful mood had seized the young idler, and he caught at her arm. Frightened,she slipped by; and half mischievously he turned and ran after her through thetall pines.
Yonder, toward the sea, at the end of the path, came Johnslowly, with his head down. He had turned wearily homeward from theschoolhouse; then, thinking to shield his mother from the blow, started to meethis sister as she came from work and break the news of his dismissal to her."I'll go away," he said slowly; "I'll go away and find work, andsend for them. I cannot live here longer." And then the fierce, buriedanger surged up into his throat. He waved his arms and hurried wildly up thepath.
The great brown sea lay silent. The air scarce breathed.The dying day bathed the twisted oaks and mighty pines in black and gold. Therecame from the wind no warning, not a whisper from the cloudless sky. There wasonly a black man hurrying on with an ache in his heart, seeing neither sun nor
Page 175
sea, but starting as from a dream at the frightened cry that woke the pines, tosee his dark sister struggling in the arms of a tall and fair-haired man.
He said not a word, but, seizing a fallen limb, struckhim with all the pent-up hatred of his great black arm, and the body lay whiteand still beneath the pines, all bathed in sunshine and in blood. John lookedat it dreamily, then walked back to the house briskly, and said in a softvoice, "Mammy, I'm going away -- I'm going to be free."
She gazed at him dimly and faltered, "No'th, honey,is yo' gwine No'th agin?"
He looked out where the North Star glistened pale abovethe waters, and said, "Yes, mammy, I'm going -- North."
Then, without another word, he went out into the narrowlane, up by the straight pines, to the same winding path, and seated himself onthe great black stump, looking at the blood where the body had lain. Yonder inthe gray past he had played with that dead boy, romping together under thesolemn trees. The night deepened; he thought of the boys at Johnstown. Hewondered how Brown had turned out, and Carey? And Jones, -- Jones? Why, he wasJones, and he wondered what they would all say when they knew, when they knew,in that great long dining-room with its hundreds of merry eyes. Then as thesheen of the starlight stole over him, he thought of the gilded ceiling of thatvast concert hall, heard stealing toward him the faint sweet music of the swan.Hark! was it music, or the hurry and shouting of men? Yes, surely! Clear andhigh the faint sweet melody rose and fluttered like a living thing, so that thevery earth trembled as with the tramp of horses and murmur of angry men.
He leaned back and smiled toward the sea, whence rose thestrange melody, away from the dark shadows where lay the noise of horsesgalloping, galloping on. With an effort he roused himself, bent forward, andlooked steadily down the pathway, softly humming the "Song of theBride," --
"Freudig gefuhrt, ziehet dahin."
Amid the trees in the dim morning twilight he watchedtheir shadows dancing and heard their horses thundering toward
Page 176
him, until at last they came sweeping like a storm, and he saw in front thathaggard white-haired man, whose eyes flashed red with fury. Oh, how he pitiedhim, -- pitied him, -- and wondered if he had the coiling twisted rope. Then,as the storm burst round him, he rose slowly to his feet and turned his closedeyes toward the Sea.
And the world whistled in his ears.
Page 177
I walk through the churchyard
To lay this body down;
I know moon-rise, I know star-rise;
I walk in the moonlight, I walk in the starlight;
I'll lie in the grave and stretch out my arms,
I'll go to judgment in the evening of the day,
And my soul and thy soul shall meet that day,
When I lay this body down.
NEGRO SONG.
They that walked in darkness sang songs in the olden days-- Sorrow Songs -- for they were weary at heart. And so before each thoughtthat I have written in this book I have set a phrase, a haunting echo of theseweird old songs in which the soul of the black slave spoke to men. Ever since Iwas a child these songs have stirred me strangely. They came out of the Southunknown to me, one by one, and yet at once I knew them as of me and of mine.Then in after years when I came to Nashville I saw the great temple builded ofthese songs towering over the pale city. To me Jubilee Hall seemed ever made ofthe songs themselves, and its bricks were red with
Page 178
the blood and dust of toil. Out of them rose for me morning, noon, and night,bursts of wonderful melody, full of the voices of my brothers and sisters, fullof the voices of the past.
Little of beauty has America given the world save therude grandeur God himself stamped on her bosom; the human spirit in this newworld has expressed itself in vigor and ingenuity rather than in beauty. And soby fateful chance the Negro folk-song -- the rhythmic cry of the slave --stands to-day not simply as the sole American music, but as the most beautifulexpression of human experience born this side the seas. It has been neglected,it has been, and is, half despised, and above all it has been persistentlymistaken and misunderstood; but notwithstanding, it still remains as thesingular spiritual heritage of the nation and the greatest gift of the Negropeople.
Away back in the thirties the melody of these slave songsstirred the nation, but the songs were soon half forgotten. Some, like"Near the lake where drooped the willow," passed into current airsand their source was forgotten; others were caricatured on the"minstrel" stage and their memory died away. Then in war-time camethe singular Port Royal experiment after the capture of Hilton Head, andperhaps for the first time the North met the Southern slave face to face andheart to heart with no third witness. The Sea Islands of the Carolinas, wherethey met, were filled with a black folk of primitive type, touched and mouldedless by the world about them than any others outside the Black Belt. Theirappearance was uncouth, their language funny, but their hearts were human andtheir singing stirred men with a mighty power. Thomas Wentworth Higginsonhastened to tell of these songs, and Miss McKim and others urged upon the worldtheir rare beauty. But the world listened only half credulously until theFisk JubileeSingers sang the slave songs so deeply into the world's heart that it cannever wholly forget them again.
There was once a blacksmith's son born at Cadiz, NewYork, who in the changes of time taught school in Ohio and helped defendCincinnati from Kirby Smith. Then he fought at Chancellorsville and Gettysburgand finally served in the Freedmen's Bureau at Nashville. Here he formed aSunday-
Page 179
school class of black children in 1866, and sang with them and taught them tosing. And then they taught him to sing, and when once the glory of the Jubileesongs passed into the soul of George L. White, he knew his life-work was to letthose Negroes sing to the world as they had sung to him. So in 1871 thepilgrimage of the Fisk Jubilee Singers began. North to Cincinnati they rode, --four half-clothed black boys and five girl-women, -- led by a man with a causeand a purpose. They stopped at Wilberforce, the oldest of Negro schools, wherea black bishop blessed them. Then they went, fighting cold and starvation, shutout of hotels, and cheerfully sneered at, ever northward; and ever the magic oftheir song kept thrilling hearts, until a burst of applause in the Congrega-tional Council at Oberlin revealed them to the world. They came to New York andHenry Ward Beecher dared to welcome them, even though the metropolitan dailiessneered at his "Nigger Minstrels." So their songs conquered till theysang across the land and across the sea, before Queen and Kaiser, in Scotlandand Ireland, Holland and Switzerland. Seven years they sang, and brought back ahundred and fifty thousand dollars to found Fisk University.
Since their day they have been imitated -- sometimeswell, by the singers of Hampton and Atlanta, sometimes ill, by stragglingquartettes. Caricature has sought again to spoil the quaint beauty of themusic, and has filled the air with many debased melodies which vulgar earsscarce know from the real. But the true Negro folk-song still lives in thehearts of those who have heard them truly sung and in the hearts of the Negropeople.
What are these songs, and what do they mean? I knowlittle of music and can say nothing in technical phrase, but I know somethingof men, and knowing them, I know that these songs are the articulate message ofthe slave to the world. They tell us in these eager days that life was joyousto the black slave, careless and happy. I can easily believe this of some, ofmany. But not all the past South, though it rose from the dead, can gainsay theheart-touching witness of these songs. They are the music of an unhappy people,of the children of disappointment; they tell of death and suffering
Page 180
and unvoiced longing toward a truer world, of misty wanderings and hidden ways.
The songs are indeed the siftings of centuries; the musicis far more ancient than the words, and in it we can trace here and there signsof development. My grandfather's grand- mother was seized by an evil Dutchtrader two centuries ago; and coming to the valleys of the Hudson andHousatonic, black, little, and lithe, she shivered and shrank in the harshnorth winds, looked longingly at the hills, and often crooned a heathen melodyto the child between her knees, thus:
The child sang it to his children and they to theirchildren's children, and so two hundred years it has travelled down to us andwe sing it to our children, knowing as little as our fathers what its words maymean, but knowing well the meaning of its music.
This was primitive African music; it may be seen inlarger form in the strange chant which heralds "The Coming of John":
"You may bury me in the East,
You may bury me in the West,
But I'll hear the trumpet sound in that morning,"
Page 181
-- the voice of exile.
Ten master songs, more or less, one may pluck from theforest of melody-songs of undoubted Negro origin and wide popular currency, andsongs peculiarly characteristic of the slave. One of these I have justmentioned. Another whose strains begin this book is "Nobody knows thetrouble I've seen." When, struck with a sudden poverty, the United Statesrefused to fulfill its promises of land to the freedmen, a brigadier-generalwent down to the Sea Islands to carry the news. An old woman on the outskirtsof the throng began singing this song; all the mass joined with her, swaying.And the soldier wept.
The third song is the cradle-song of death which all menknow,-"Swing low, sweet chariot," -- whose bars begin the life storyof "Alexander Crummell." Then there is the song of many waters,"Roll, Jordan, roll," a mighty chorus with minor cadences. There weremany songs of the fugitive like that which opens "The Wings ofAtalanta," and the more familiar "Been a-listening." The seventhis the song of the End and the Beginning -- "My Lord, what a mourning!when the stars begin to fall"; a strain of this is placed before "TheDawn of Freedom." The song of groping -- "My way's cloudy" --begins "The Meaning of Progress"; the ninth is the song of thischapter -- "Wrestlin' Jacob, the day is a-breaking," -- a paean ofhopeful strife. The last master song is the song of songs -- "Stealaway," -- sprung from "The Faith of the Fathers."
There are many others of the Negro folk-songs as strikingand characteristic as these, as, for instance, the three strains in the third,eighth, and ninth chapters; and others I am sure could easily make a selectionon more scientific principles. There are, too, songs that seem to be a stepremoved from the more primitive types: there is the maze-like medley,"Bright sparkles," one phrase of which heads "The BlackBelt"; the Easter carol, "Dust, dust and ashes"; the dirge,"My moth- er's took her flight and gone home"; and that burst ofmelody hovering over "The Passing of the First-Born" -- "I hopemy mother will be there in that beautiful world on high."
These represent a third step in the development of theslave song, of which "You may bury me in the East" is the first,
Page 182
and songs like "March on" (chapter six) and "Steal away"are the second. The first is African music, the second Afro- American, whilethe third is a blending of Negro music with the music heard in the foster land.The result is still distinctively Negro and the method of blending original,but the elements are both Negro and Caucasian. One might go further and find afourth step in this development, where the songs of white America have beendistinctively influenced by the slave songs or have incorporated whole phrasesof Negro melody, as "Swanee River" and "Old Black Joe."Side by side, too, with the growth has gone the debasements and imitations --the Negro "minstrel" songs, many of the "gospel" hymns, andsome of the contemporary "coon" songs, -- a mass of music in whichthe novice may easily lose himself and never find the real Negro melodies.
In these songs, I have said, the slave spoke to theworld. Such a message is naturally veiled and half articulate. Words and musichave lost each other and new and cant phrases of a dimly understood theologyhave displaced the older sentiment. Once in a while we catch a strange word ofan unknown tongue, as the "Mighty Myo," which figures as a river ofdeath; more often slight words or mere doggerel are joined to music of singularsweetness. Purely secular songs are few in number, partly because many of themwere turned into hymns by a change of words, partly because the frolics wereseldom heard by the stranger, and the music less often caught. Of nearly allthe songs, however, the music is distinctly sorrowful. The ten master songs Ihave mentioned tell in word and music of trouble and exile, of strife andhiding; they grope toward some unseen power and sigh for rest in the End.
The words that are left to us are not without interest,and, cleared of evident dross, they conceal much of real poetry and meaningbeneath conventional theology and unmeaning rhapsody. Like all primitive folk,the slave stood near to Nature's heart. Life was a "rough and rollingsea" like the brown Atlantic of the Sea Islands; the"Wilderness" was the home of God, and the "lonesome valley"led to the way of life. "Winter'll soon be over," was the picture oflife and death to a tropical imagination. The sudden wild thunder-
Page 183
storms of the South awed and impressed the Negroes, -- at times the rumblingseemed to them "mournful," at times imperious:
"My Lord calls me,
He calls me by the thunder,
The trumpet sounds it in my soul."
The monotonous toil and exposure is painted in many words.One sees the ploughmen in the hot, moist furrow, singing:
"Dere's no rain to wet you,
Dere's no sun to burn you,
Oh, push along, believer,
I want to go home."
The bowed and bent old man cries, with thrice-repeatedwail:
"O Lord, keep me from sinking down,"
and he rebukes the devil of doubt who can whisper:
"Jesus is dead and God's gone away."
Yet the soul-hunger is there, the restlessness of thesavage, the wail of the wanderer, and the plaint is put in one little phrase:
Over the inner thoughts of the slaves and their relationsone with another the shadow of fear ever hung, so that we get but glimpses hereand there, and also with them, eloquent omissions and silences. Mother andchild are sung, but seldom father; fugitive and weary wanderer call for pityand affection, but there is little of wooing and wedding; the rocks and
Page 164
the mountains are well known, but home is unknown. Strange blending of love andhelplessness sings through the refrain:
"Yonder's my ole mudder,
Been waggin' at de hill so long;
'Bout time she cross over,
Git home bime-by."
Elsewhere comes the cry of the "motherless" andthe "Fare- well, farewell, my only child."
Love-songs are scarce and fall into two categories -- thefrivolous and light, and the sad. Of deep successful love there is ominoussilence, and in one of the oldest of these songs there is a depth of historyand meaning:
A black woman said of the song, "It can't be sungwithout a full heart and a troubled sperrit." The same voice sings herethat sings in the German folk-song:
"Jetz Geh i' an's brunele, trink' aber net."
Of death the Negro showed little fear, but talked of itfamiliarly and even fondly as simply a crossing of the waters, perhaps -- whoknows? -- back to his ancient forests again. Later
Page 185
days transfigured his fatalism, and amid the dust and dirt the toiler sang:
"Dust, dust and ashes, fly over my grave,
But the Lord shall bear my spirit home."
The things evidently borrowed from the surrounding worldundergo characteristic change when they enter the mouth of the slave.Especially is this true of Bible phrases. "Weep, O captive daughter ofZion," is quaintly turned into "Zion, weep-a-low," and thewheels of Ezekiel are turned every way in the mystic dreaming of the slave,till he says:
"There's a little wheel a-turnin' in-a-my heart."
As in olden time, the words of these hymns were impro-vised by some leading minstrel of the religious band. The circumstances of thegathering, however, the rhythm of the songs, and the limitations of allowablethought, confined the poetry for the most part to single or double lines, andthey seldom were expanded to quatrains or longer tales, although there are somefew examples of sustained efforts, chiefly paraphrases of the Bible. Threeshort series of verses have always attracted me, -- the one that heads thischapter, of one line of which Thomas Wentworth Higginson has fittingly said,"Never, it seems to me, since man first lived and suffered was hisinfinite longing for peace uttered more plain- tively." The second andthird are descriptions of the Last Judgment, -- the one a late improvisation,with some traces of outside influence:
"Oh, the stars in the elements are falling,
And the moon drips away into blood,
And the ransomed of the Lord are returning unto God,
Blessed be the name of the Lord."
And the other earlier and homelier picture from the lowcoast lands:
"Michael, haul the boat ashore,
Then you'll hear the horn they blow,
Page 186
Then you'll hear the trumpet sound,
Trumpet sound the world around,
Trumpet sound for rich and poor,
Trumpet sound the Jubilee,
Trumpet sound for you and me."
Through all the sorrow of the Sorrow Songs there breathesa hope -- a faith in the ultimate justice of things. The minor cadences ofdespair change often to triumph and calm confidence. Sometimes it is faith inlife, sometimes a faith in death, sometimes assurance of boundless justice insome fair world beyond. But whichever it is, the meaning is always clear: thatsometime, somewhere, men will judge men by their souls and not by their skins.Is such a hope justified? Do the Sorrow Songs sing true?
The silently growing assumption of this age is that theprobation of races is past, and that the backward races of to-day are of proveninefficiency and not worth the saving. Such an assumption is the arrogance ofpeoples irreverent toward Time and ignorant of the deeds of men. A thousandyears ago such an assumption, easily possible, would have made it difficult forthe Teuton to prove his right to life. Two thousand years ago such dogmatism,readily welcome, would have scouted the idea of blond races ever leadingcivilization. So wofully unorganized is sociological knowledge that the meaningof progress, the meaning of "swift" and "slow" in humandoing, and the limits of human perfectability, are veiled, unanswered sphinxeson the shores of science. Why should AEschylus have sung two thousand yearsbefore Shakespeare was born? Why has civilization flourished in Europe, andflickered, flamed, and died in Africa? So long as the world stands meekly dumbbefore such questions, shall this nation proclaim its ignorance and unhallowedprejudices by denying freedom of opportunity to those who brought the SorrowSongs to the Seats of the Mighty?
Your country? How came it yours? Before the Pilgrimslanded we were here. Here we have brought our three gifts and mingled them withyours: a gift of story and song -- soft, stirring melody in an ill-harmonizedand unmelodious land; the gift of sweat and brawn to beat back the wilderness,conquer
Page 187
the soil, and lay the foundations of this vast economic empire two hundredyears earlier than your weak hands could have done it; the third, a gift of theSpirit. Around us the history of the land has centred for thrice a hundredyears; out of the nation's heart we have called all that was best to throttleand subdue all that was worst; fire and blood, prayer and sacrifice, havebillowed over this people, and they have found peace only in the altars of theGod of Right. Nor has our gift of the Spirit been merely passive. Actively wehave woven ourselves with the very warp and woof of this nation, -- we foughttheir battles, shared their sorrow, mingled our blood with theirs, andgeneration after generation have pleaded with a headstrong, careless people todespise not Justice, Mercy, and Truth, lest the nation be smitten with a curse.Our song, our toil, our cheer, and warning have been given to this nation inblood-brotherhood. Are not these gifts worth the giving? Is not this work andstriving? Would America have been America without her Negro people?
Even so is the hope that sang in the songs of my fatherswell sung. If somewhere in this whirl and chaos of things there dwells EternalGood, pitiful yet masterful, then anon in His good time America shall rend theVeil and the prisoned shall go free. Free, free as the sunshine trickling downthe morning into these high windows of mine, free as yonder fresh young voiceswelling up to me from the caverns of brick and mortar below -- swelling withsong, instinct with life, tremulous treble and darkening bass. My children, mylittle children, are singing to the sunshine, and thus they sing:
Page 188
And the traveller girds himself, and sets his face towardthe Morning, and goes his way.
Page 189
Hear my cry, O God the Reader; vouchsafe that this mybook fall not still-born into the world wilderness. Let there spring, GentleOne, from out its leaves vigor of thought and thoughtful deed to reap theharvest wonderful. Let the ears of a guilty people tingle with truth, andseventy millions sigh for the righteousness which exalteth nations, in thisdrear day when human brotherhood is mockery and a snare. Thus in Thy good timemay infinite reason turn the tangle straight, and these crooked marks on afragile leaf be not indeed
THE END