4/23/23, 12:18 PM The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Souls of Black Folk, by W. E. B.

Du Bois

The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Souls of Black

Folk, by W. E. B. Du Bois
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Title: The Souls of Black Folk

Author: W. E. B. Du Bois

Release Date: January, 1996 [eBook #408]

[Most recently updated: August 11, 2021]

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE

SOULS OF BLACK FOLK ***

The Souls of
Black Folk

by W. E. B. Du Bois

Herein is Written
The Forethought
I. Of Our Spiritual Strivings
II. Of the Dawn of Freedom
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III. Of Mr. Booker T. Washington and Others

IV. Of the Meaning of Progress
V. Of the Wings of Atalanta
VI. Of the Training of Black Men
VII. Of the Black Belt
VIII. Of the Quest of the Golden Fleece
IX. Of the Sons of Master and Man
X. Of the Faith of the Fathers
XI. Of the Passing of the First-Born
XII. Of Alexander Crummell
XIII. Of the Coming of John
XIV. Of the Sorrow Songs
The Afterthought

To
Burghardt and Yolande
The Lost and the Found

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The Forethought
Herein lie buried many things which if read with patience may
show the strange meaning of being black here at the dawning of the
Twentieth 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.
I pray you, then, receive my little book in all charity, studying my
words with me, forgiving mistake and foible for sake of the faith and
passion that is in me, and seeking the grain of truth hidden there.
I have sought here to sketch, in vague, uncertain outline, the
spiritual world in which ten thousand thousand Americans live and
strive. First, in two chapters I have tried to show what Emancipation
meant to them, and what was its aftermath. In a third chapter I have
pointed out the slow rise of personal leadership, and criticized
candidly the leader who bears the chief burden of his race to-day.
Then, in two other chapters I have sketched in swift outline the two
worlds within and without the Veil, and thus have come to the central
problem of training men for life. Venturing now into deeper detail, I
have in two chapters studied the struggles of the massed millions of
the black peasantry, and in another have sought to make clear the
present relations of the sons of master and man. Leaving, then, the
white world, I have stepped within the Veil, raising it that you may
view faintly its deeper recesses,—the meaning of its religion, the
passion of its human sorrow, and the struggle of its greater souls. All
this I have ended with a tale twice told but seldom written, and a
chapter of song.
Some of these thoughts of mine have seen the light before in other
guise. For kindly consenting to their republication here, in altered
and extended form, I must thank the publishers of the Atlantic
Monthly, The World’s Work, the Dial, The New World, and the
Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science.
Before each chapter, as now printed, stands a bar of the Sorrow
Songs,—some echo of haunting melody from the only American
music which welled up from black souls in the dark past. And,
finally, need I add that I who speak here am bone of the bone and
flesh of the flesh of them that live within the Veil?

W.E.B. Du B.

Atlanta, Ga., Feb. 1, 1903.

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I.
Of Our Spiritual Strivings
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 unasked question:

unasked by some through feelings of delicacy; by others through the
difficulty of rightly framing it. All, nevertheless, flutter round it.
They approach me in a half-hesitant sort of way, eye me curiously or
compassionately, and then, instead of saying directly, How does it
feel to be a problem? they say, I know an excellent colored man in
my town; or, I fought at Mechanicsville; or, Do not these Southern
outrages make your blood boil? At these I smile, or am interested, or
reduce the boiling to a simmer, as the occasion may require. To the
real question, How does it feel to be a problem? I answer seldom a
word.
And yet, being a problem is a strange experience,—peculiar even
for one who has never been anything else, save perhaps in babyhood
and in Europe. It is in the early days of rollicking boyhood that the
revelation first bursts upon one, all in a day, as it were. I remember
well when the shadow swept across me. I was a little thing, away up
in the hills of New England, where the dark Housatonic winds
between Hoosac and Taghkanic to the sea. In a wee wooden
schoolhouse, something put it into the boys’ and girls’ heads to buy
gorgeous visiting-cards—ten cents a package—and exchange. The
exchange was merry, till one girl, a tall newcomer, refused my card,
—refused it peremptorily, with a glance. Then it dawned upon me
with a certain suddenness that I was different from the others; or like,
mayhap, in heart and life and longing, but shut out from their world
by a vast veil. I had thereafter no desire to tear down that veil, to
creep through; I held all beyond it in common contempt, and lived
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above it in a region of blue sky and great wandering shadows. That

sky was bluest when I could beat my mates at examination-time, or
beat them at a foot-race, or even beat their stringy heads. Alas, with
the years all this fine contempt began to fade; for the words I longed
for, and all their dazzling opportunities, were theirs, not mine. But
they 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 the sick, by telling the wonderful tales that swam in
my head,—some way. With other black boys the strife was not so
fiercely sunny: their youth shrunk into tasteless sycophancy, or into
silent hatred of the pale world about them and mocking distrust of
everything white; or wasted itself in a bitter cry, Why did God make
me an outcast and a stranger in mine own house? The shades of the
prison-house closed round about us all: walls strait and stubborn to
the whitest, but relentlessly narrow, tall, and unscalable to sons of
night who must 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 Teuton
and Mongolian, the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil,
and gifted with second-sight in this American world,—a world which
yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself
through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation,
this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self
through the eyes of others, of measuring one’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
dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.
The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife,—
this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double
self into a better and truer self. In this merging he wishes neither of
the older selves to be lost. He would not Africanize America, for
America has too much to teach the world and Africa. He would not
bleach his Negro soul in a flood of white Americanism, for he knows
that Negro blood has a message for the world. He simply wishes to
make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American,
without being cursed and spit upon by his fellows, without having
the doors of Opportunity closed roughly in his face.
This, then, is the end of his striving: to be a co-worker in the
kingdom of culture, to escape both death and isolation, to husband
and use his best powers and his latent genius. These powers of body
and mind have in the past been strangely wasted, dispersed, or
forgotten. The shadow of a mighty Negro past flits through the tale of
Ethiopia the Shadowy and of Egypt the Sphinx. Through history, the
powers of single black men flash here and there like falling stars, and
die sometimes before the world has rightly gauged their brightness.
Here in America, in the few days since Emancipation, the black
man’s turning hither and thither in hesitant and doubtful striving has
often made his very strength to lose effectiveness, to seem like
absence of power, like weakness. And yet it is not weakness,—it is
the contradiction of double aims. The double-aimed struggle of the
black artisan—on the one hand to escape white contempt for a nation

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of mere hewers of wood and drawers of water, and on the other hand
to plough and nail and dig for a poverty-stricken horde—could only
result in making him a poor craftsman, for he had but half a heart in
either cause. By the poverty and ignorance of his people, the Negro
minister or doctor was tempted 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 black savant was
confronted by the paradox that the knowledge his people needed was
a twice-told tale to his white neighbors, while the knowledge which
would teach the white world was Greek to his own flesh and blood.
The innate love of harmony and beauty that set the ruder souls of his
people a-dancing and a-singing raised but confusion and doubt in the
soul of the black artist; for the beauty revealed to him was the soul-
beauty of a race which his larger audience despised, and he could not
articulate the message of another people. This waste of double aims,
this seeking to satisfy two unreconciled ideals, has wrought sad
havoc with the courage and faith and deeds of ten thousand thousand
people,—has sent them often wooing false gods and invoking false
means of salvation, and at times has even seemed about to make
them ashamed of themselves.
Away back in the days of bondage they thought to see in one
divine event the end of all doubt and disappointment; few men ever
worshipped Freedom with half such unquestioning faith as did the
American Negro for two centuries. To him, so far as he thought and
dreamed, slavery was indeed the 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 ever stretched before the eyes
of wearied Israelites. In song and exhortation swelled one refrain—
Liberty; in his tears and curses the God he implored had Freedom in
his right hand. At last it came,—suddenly, fearfully, like a dream.
With one wild carnival of blood and passion came the message in his
own plaintive cadences:—
“Shout, O children!
Shout, you’re free!
For God has bought your liberty!”

Years have passed away since then,—ten, twenty, forty; forty years
of national life, forty years of renewal and development, and yet the
swarthy spectre sits in its accustomed seat at the Nation’s feast. In
vain do 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; the freedman has
not yet found in freedom his promised land. Whatever of good may
have come in these years of change, the shadow of a deep
disappointment rests upon the Negro people,—a disappointment all
the more bitter because the unattained ideal was unbounded save by
the simple ignorance of a lowly people.
The first decade was merely a prolongation of the vain search for
freedom, the boon that seemed ever barely to elude their grasp,—like
a tantalizing will-o’-the-wisp, maddening and misleading the
headless host. The holocaust of war, the terrors of the Ku-Klux Klan,
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the lies of carpet-baggers, the disorganization of industry, and the

contradictory advice of friends and foes, left the bewildered serf with
no new watchword beyond the old 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 the Fifteenth
Amendment gave him. The ballot, which before he had looked upon
as a visible sign of freedom, he now regarded as the chief means of
gaining and perfecting the liberty with which war had partially
endowed him. And why not? Had not votes made war and
emancipated millions? Had not votes enfranchised the freedmen?
Was anything impossible to a power that had done all this? A million
black men started with renewed zeal to vote themselves into the
kingdom. So the decade flew away, the revolution of 1876 came, and
left the half-free serf weary, wondering, but still inspired. Slowly but
steadily, in the following years, a new vision began gradually to
replace the dream of political power,—a powerful movement, the
rise of another ideal to guide the unguided, another pillar of fire by
night after a clouded day. It was the ideal of “book-learning”; the
curiosity, born of compulsory ignorance, to know and test the power
of the cabalistic letters of the white man, the longing to know. Here
at last seemed to have been discovered the mountain path to Canaan;
longer than the highway of Emancipation and law, steep and rugged,
but straight, leading to heights high enough to overlook 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 schools know how faithfully, how piteously, this people strove
to learn. It was weary work. 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. To the tired climbers, the
horizon was ever dark, the mists were often cold, the Canaan was
always dim and far away. If, however, the vistas disclosed as yet no
goal, no resting-place, little but flattery and criticism, the journey at
least gave leisure for reflection and self-examination; it changed the
child of Emancipation to the youth with dawning self-consciousness,
self-realization, self-respect. In those sombre forests of his striving
his own soul rose before him, and he saw himself,—darkly as
through a veil; and yet he saw in himself some faint revelation of his
power, of his mission. He began to have a dim feeling that, to attain
his place in the world, he must be himself, and not another. For the
first time he sought to analyze the burden he bore upon his back, that
dead-weight of social degradation partially masked behind a half-
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 a land of dollars is the very bottom of
hardships. He felt the weight of his ignorance,—not simply of letters,
but of life, of business, of the humanities; the accumulated sloth and
shirking and awkwardness of decades and centuries shackled his
hands and feet. Nor was his burden all poverty and ignorance. The
red stain of bastardy, which two centuries of systematic legal
defilement of Negro women had stamped upon his race, meant not
only the loss of ancient African chastity, but also the hereditary

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weight of a mass of corruption from white adulterers, threatening

almost the obliteration of the Negro home.
A people thus handicapped ought not to be asked to race with the
world, but rather allowed to give all its time and thought to its own
social problems. But alas! while sociologists gleefully count his
bastards and his prostitutes, the very soul of the toiling, sweating
black man is darkened by the shadow of a vast despair. Men call the
shadow prejudice, and learnedly explain it as the natural defence of
culture against barbarism, learning against ignorance, purity against
crime, the “higher” against the “lower” races. To which the Negro
cries Amen! and swears that to so much 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 stands helpless,
dismayed, and well-nigh speechless; before that personal disrespect
and mockery, the ridicule and systematic humiliation, the distortion
of fact and wanton license of fancy, the cynical ignoring of the better
and the boisterous welcoming of the worse, the all-pervading desire
to inculcate disdain for everything black, from Toussaint to the devil,
—before this there rises a sickening despair that would disarm and
discourage any nation save that black host to whom
“discouragement” is an unwritten word.
But the facing of so vast a prejudice could not but bring the
inevitable self-questioning, self-disparagement, and lowering of
ideals which ever accompany repression and breed in an atmosphere
of contempt and hate. Whisperings and portents came home upon the
four winds: Lo! we are diseased 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 Nation echoed and enforced
this self-criticism, saying: Be content to be servants, and nothing
more; what need of higher culture for half-men? Away with the black
man’s ballot, by force or fraud,—and behold the suicide of a race!
Nevertheless, out of the evil came something of good,—the more
careful adjustment of education to real life, the clearer perception of
the Negroes’ social responsibilities, and the sobering realization of
the meaning of progress.
So dawned the time of Sturm und Drang: storm and stress to-day
rocks our little boat on the mad waters of the world-sea; there is
within and without the sound of conflict, the burning of body and
rending of soul; inspiration strives with doubt, and faith with vain
questionings. The bright ideals of the past,—physical freedom,
political power, the training of brains and the training of hands,—all
these in turn have waxed and waned, until even the last grows dim
and overcast. Are they all wrong,—all false? No, not that, but each
alone was over-simple and incomplete,—the dreams of a credulous
race-childhood, or the fond imaginings of the other world which does
not know and does not want to know our power. To be really true, all
these ideals must be melted and welded into one. The training of the
schools we need to-day more than ever,—the training of deft hands,
quick eyes and ears, and above all the broader, deeper, higher culture
of gifted minds and pure hearts. The power of the ballot we need in
sheer self-defence,—else what shall save us from a second slavery?
Freedom, too, the long-sought, we still seek,—the freedom of life

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and limb, the freedom to work and think, the freedom to love and
aspire. Work, culture, liberty,—all these we need, not singly but
together, not successively but together, each growing and aiding
each, and all striving toward that vaster ideal that swims before the
Negro people, the ideal of human brotherhood, gained through the
unifying ideal of Race; the ideal of fostering and developing the
traits and talents of the Negro, not in opposition to or contempt for
other races, but rather in large conformity to the greater ideals of the
American Republic, in order that some day on American soil two
world-races may give each to each those characteristics both so sadly
lack. We the darker ones come even now not altogether empty-
handed: there are to-day no truer exponents of the pure human spirit
of the Declaration of Independence than the American Negroes; there
is no true American music but the wild sweet melodies of the Negro
slave; the American fairy tales and folklore are Indian and African;
and, all in all, we black men seem the sole oasis of simple faith and
reverence in a dusty desert of dollars and smartness. Will America be
poorer if she replace her brutal dyspeptic blundering with light-
hearted but determined Negro humility? or her coarse and cruel wit
with loving jovial good-humor? or her vulgar music with the soul of
the Sorrow Songs?
Merely a concrete test of the underlying principles of the great
republic is the Negro Problem, and the spiritual striving of the
freedmen’s sons is the travail of souls whose burden is almost
beyond the measure of their strength, but who bear it in the name of
an historic race, in the name of this the land of their fathers’ fathers,
and in the name of human opportunity.

And now what I have briefly sketched in large outline let me on

coming pages tell again in many ways, with loving emphasis and
deeper detail, that men may listen to the striving in the souls of black
folk.

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II.
Of the Dawn of Freedom
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 the color-

line,—the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asia
and Africa, in America and the islands of the sea. It was a phase of
this problem that caused the Civil War; and however much they who
marched South and North in 1861 may have fixed on the technical
points, of union and local autonomy as a shibboleth, all nevertheless
knew, as we know, that the question of Negro slavery was the real
cause of the conflict. Curious it was, too, how this deeper question
ever forced itself to the surface despite effort and disclaimer. No
sooner had Northern armies touched Southern soil than this old
question, newly guised, sprang from the earth,—What shall be done
with Negroes? Peremptory military commands this way and that,
could not answer the query; the Emancipation Proclamation seemed
but to broaden and intensify the difficulties; and the War
Amendments made the Negro problems of to-day.
It is the aim of this essay to study the period of history from 1861
to 1872 so far as it relates to the American Negro. In effect, this tale
of the dawn of Freedom is an account of that government of men
called the Freedmen’s Bureau,—one of the most singular and
interesting of the attempts made by a great nation to grapple with
vast problems of race and social condition.
The war has naught to do with slaves, cried Congress, the
President, and the Nation; and yet no sooner had the armies, East and
West, penetrated Virginia and Tennessee than fugitive slaves

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appeared within their lines. They came at night, when the flickering
camp-fires shone like vast unsteady stars along the black horizon: old
men and thin, with gray and tufted hair; women with frightened eyes,
dragging whimpering hungry children; men and girls, stalwart and
gaunt,—a horde of starving vagabonds, homeless, helpless, and
pitiable, in their dark distress. Two methods of treating these
newcomers seemed equally logical to opposite sorts of minds. Ben
Butler, in Virginia, quickly declared slave property contraband of
war, and put the fugitives to work; while Fremont, in Missouri,
declared the slaves free under martial law. Butler’s action was
approved, but Fremont’s was hastily countermanded, and his
successor, Halleck, saw things differently. “Hereafter,” he
commanded, “no slaves should be allowed to come into your lines at
all; if any come without your knowledge, when owners call for them
deliver them.” Such a policy was difficult to enforce; some of the
black refugees declared themselves freemen, others showed that their
masters had deserted them, and still others were captured with forts
and plantations. Evidently, too, slaves were a source of strength to
the Confederacy, and were being used as laborers and producers.
“They constitute a military resource,” wrote Secretary Cameron, late
in 1861; “and being such, that they should not be turned over to the
enemy is too plain to discuss.” So gradually the tone of the army
chiefs changed; Congress forbade the rendition of fugitives, and
Butler’s “contrabands” were welcomed as military laborers. This
complicated rather than solved the problem, for now the scattering
fugitives became a steady stream, which flowed faster as the armies
marched.
Then the long-headed man with care-chiselled face who sat in the
White House saw the inevitable, and emancipated the slaves of
rebels on New Year’s, 1863. A month later Congress called earnestly
for the Negro soldiers 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 fugitives swelled to a flood, and
anxious army officers kept inquiring: “What must be done with
slaves, arriving almost daily? Are we to find food and shelter for
women and children?”
It was a Pierce of Boston who pointed out the way, and thus
became in a sense the founder of the Freedmen’s Bureau. He was a
firm friend of Secretary Chase; and when, in 1861, the care of slaves
and abandoned lands devolved upon the Treasury officials, Pierce
was specially detailed from the ranks to study the conditions. First,
he cared for the refugees at Fortress Monroe; and then, after Sherman
had captured Hilton Head, Pierce was sent there to found his Port
Royal experiment of making free workingmen out of slaves. Before
his experiment was barely started, however, the problem of the
fugitives had assumed such proportions that it was taken from the
hands of the over-burdened Treasury Department and given to the
army officials. Already centres of massed freedmen were forming at
Fortress Monroe, Washington, New Orleans, Vicksburg and Corinth,
Columbus, Ky., and Cairo, Ill., as well as at Port Royal. Army
chaplains found here new and fruitful fields; “superintendents of
contrabands” multiplied, and some attempt at systematic work was
made by enlisting the able-bodied men and giving work to the others.

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Then came the Freedmen’s Aid societies, born of the touching

appeals from Pierce and from these other centres of distress. There
was the American Missionary Association, sprung from the Amistad,
and now full-grown for work; the various church organizations, the
National Freedmen’s Relief Association, the American Freedmen’s
Union, the Western Freedmen’s Aid Commission,—in all fifty or
more active organizations, which sent clothes, money, school-books,
and teachers southward. All they did was needed, for the destitution
of the freedmen was often reported as “too appalling for belief,” and
the situation was daily growing worse rather than better.
And daily, too, it seemed more plain that this was no ordinary
matter of temporary relief, but a national crisis; for here loomed a
labor problem of vast dimensions. Masses of Negroes stood idle, or,
if they worked spasmodically, were never sure of pay; and if
perchance they received pay, squandered the new thing thoughtlessly.
In these and other ways were camp-life and the new liberty
demoralizing the freedmen. The broader economic organization thus
clearly demanded sprang up here and there as accident and local
conditions determined. Here it was that Pierce’s Port Royal plan of
leased plantations and guided workmen pointed out the rough way.
In Washington the military governor, at the urgent appeal of the
superintendent, opened confiscated estates to the cultivation of the
fugitives, and there in the shadow of the dome gathered black farm
villages. General Dix gave over estates to the freedmen of Fortress
Monroe, and so on, South and West. The government and benevolent
societies furnished the means of cultivation, and the Negro turned
again slowly to work. The systems of control, thus started, rapidly
grew, here and there, into strange little governments, like that of
General Banks in Louisiana, with its ninety thousand black subjects,
its fifty thousand guided laborers, and its annual budget of one
hundred thousand dollars and more. It made out four thousand pay-
rolls a year, registered all freedmen, inquired into grievances and
redressed them, laid and collected taxes, and established a system of
public schools. So, too, Colonel Eaton, the superintendent of
Tennessee and Arkansas, ruled over one hundred thousand freedmen,
leased and cultivated seven thousand acres of cotton land, and fed ten
thousand paupers a year. In South Carolina was General Saxton, with
his deep interest in black folk. He succeeded Pierce and the Treasury
officials, and sold forfeited estates, leased abandoned plantations,
encouraged schools, and received from Sherman, after that terribly
picturesque march to the sea, thousands of the wretched camp
followers.
Three characteristic things one might have seen in Sherman’s raid
through Georgia, which threw the new situation in shadowy relief:
the Conqueror, the Conquered, and the Negro. Some see all
significance in the grim front of the destroyer, and some in the bitter
sufferers of the Lost Cause. But to me neither soldier nor fugitive
speaks with so deep a meaning as that dark human cloud that clung
like remorse on the rear of those swift columns, swelling at times to
half their size, almost engulfing and choking them. In vain were they
ordered back, in vain were bridges hewn from beneath their feet; on
they trudged and writhed and surged, until they rolled into Savannah,
a starved and naked horde of tens of thousands. There too came the
characteristic military remedy: “The islands from Charleston south,
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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 set apart for the settlement of Negroes now made free
by act of war.” So read the celebrated “Field-order Number Fifteen.”
All these experiments, orders, and systems were bound to attract
and perplex the government and the nation. Directly after the
Emancipation Proclamation, Representative Eliot had introduced a
bill creating a Bureau of Emancipation; but it was never reported.
The following June a committee of inquiry, appointed by the
Secretary of War, reported in favor of a temporary bureau for the
“improvement, protection, and employment of refugee freedmen,” on
much the same lines as were afterwards followed. Petitions came in
to President Lincoln from distinguished citizens and organizations,
strongly urging a comprehensive and unified plan of dealing with the
freedmen, under a bureau which should be “charged with the study
of plans and execution of measures for easily guiding, and in every
way judiciously and humanely aiding, the passage of our
emancipated and yet to be emancipated blacks from the old condition
of forced labor to their new state of voluntary industry.”
Some half-hearted steps were taken to accomplish this, in part, by
putting the whole matter again in charge of the special Treasury
agents. Laws of 1863 and 1864 directed them to take charge of and
lease abandoned lands for periods not exceeding twelve months, and
to “provide in such leases, or otherwise, for the employment and
general welfare” of the freedmen. Most of the army officers greeted
this as a welcome relief from perplexing “Negro affairs,” and
Secretary Fessenden, July 29, 1864, issued an excellent system of
regulations, which were afterward closely followed by General
Howard. Under Treasury agents, large quantities of land were leased
in the Mississippi Valley, and many Negroes were employed; but in
August, 1864, the new regulations were suspended for reasons of
“public policy,” and the army was again in control.
Meanwhile Congress had turned its attention to the subject; and in
March the House passed a bill by a majority of two establishing a
Bureau for Freedmen in the War Department. Charles Sumner, who
had charge of the bill in the Senate, argued that freedmen and
abandoned lands ought to be under the same department, and
reported a substitute for the House bill attaching the Bureau to the
Treasury Department. This bill passed, but too late for action by the
House. The debates wandered over the whole policy of the
administration and the general question of slavery, without touching
very closely the specific merits of the measure in hand. Then the
national election took place; and the administration, with a vote of
renewed confidence from the country, addressed itself to the matter
more seriously. A conference between the two branches of Congress
agreed upon a carefully drawn measure which contained the chief
provisions of Sumner’s bill, but made the proposed organization a
department independent of both the War and the Treasury officials.
The bill was conservative, giving the new department “general
superintendence of all freedmen.” Its purpose was to “establish
regulations” for them, protect them, lease them lands, adjust their
wages, and appear in civil and military courts as their “next friend.”
There were many limitations attached to the powers thus granted,

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and the organization was made permanent. Nevertheless, the Senate

defeated the bill, and a new conference committee was appointed.
This committee reported a new bill, February 28, which was whirled
through just as the session closed, and became the act of 1865
establishing in the War Department a “Bureau of Refugees,
Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands.”
This last compromise was a hasty bit of legislation, vague and
uncertain in outline. A Bureau was created, “to continue during the
present War of Rebellion, and for one year thereafter,” to which was
given “the supervision and management of all abandoned lands and
the control of all subjects relating to refugees and freedmen,” under
“such rules and regulations as may be presented by the head of the
Bureau and approved by the President.” A Commissioner, appointed
by the President and Senate, was to control the Bureau, with an office
force not exceeding ten clerks. The President might also appoint
assistant commissioners in the seceded States, and to all these offices
military officials might be detailed at regular pay. The Secretary of
War could issue rations, clothing, and fuel to the destitute, and all
abandoned property was placed in the hands of the Bureau for
eventual lease and sale to ex-slaves in forty-acre parcels.
Thus did the United States government definitely assume charge
of the emancipated Negro as the ward of the nation. It was a
tremendous undertaking. Here at a stroke of the pen was erected a
government of millions of men,—and not ordinary men either, but
black men emasculated by a peculiarly complete system of slavery,
centuries old; and now, suddenly, violently, they come into a new
birthright, at a time of war and passion, in the 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 vast
responsibilities, indefinite powers, and limited resources. Probably
no one but a soldier would have answered such a call promptly; and,
indeed, no one but a soldier could be called, for Congress had
appropriated no money for salaries and expenses.
Less than a month after the weary Emancipator passed to his rest,
his successor assigned Major-Gen. Oliver O. Howard to duty as
Commissioner of the new Bureau. He was a Maine man, then only
thirty-five years of age. He had marched with Sherman to the sea,
had fought well at Gettysburg, and but the year before had been
assigned to the command of the Department of Tennessee. An honest
man, with too much faith in human nature, little aptitude for business
and intricate detail, he had had large opportunity of becoming
acquainted at first hand with much of the work before him. And of
that work it has been truly said that “no approximately correct
history of civilization can ever be written which does not throw out
in bold relief, as one of the great landmarks of political and social
progress, the organization and administration of the Freedmen’s
Bureau.”
On May 12, 1865, Howard was appointed; and he assumed the
duties of his office promptly on the 15th, and began examining the
field of work. A curious mess he looked upon: little despotisms,
communistic experiments, slavery, peonage, business speculations,
organized charity, unorganized almsgiving,—all reeling on under the
guise of helping the freedmen, and all enshrined in the smoke and
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blood of the war and the cursing and silence of angry men. On May
19 the new government—for a government it really was—issued its
constitution; commissioners were to be appointed in each of the
seceded states, who were to take charge of “all subjects relating to
refugees and freedmen,” and all relief and rations were to be given
by their consent alone. The Bureau invited continued cooperation
with benevolent societies, and declared: “It will be the object of all
commissioners to introduce practicable systems of compensated
labor,” and to establish schools. Forthwith nine assistant
commissioners were appointed. They were to hasten to their fields of
work; seek gradually to close relief establishments, and make the
destitute self-supporting; act as courts of law where there were no
courts, or where Negroes were not recognized in them as free;
establish the institution of marriage among ex-slaves, and keep
records; see that freedmen were free to choose their employers, and
help in making fair contracts for them; and finally, the circular said:
“Simple good faith, for which we hope on all hands for those
concerned in the passing away of slavery, will especially relieve the
assistant commissioners in the discharge of their duties toward the
freedmen, as well as promote the general welfare.”
No sooner was the work thus started, and the general system and
local organization in some measure begun, than two grave difficulties
appeared which changed largely the theory and outcome of Bureau
work. First, there were the abandoned lands of the South. It had long
been the more or less definitely expressed theory of the North that all
the chief problems of Emancipation might be settled by establishing
the slaves on the forfeited lands of their masters,—a sort of poetic
justice, said some. But this poetry done into solemn prose meant
either wholesale confiscation of private property in the South, or vast
appropriations. Now Congress had not appropriated a cent, and no
sooner did the proclamations of general amnesty appear than the
eight hundred thousand acres of abandoned lands in the hands of the
Freedmen’s Bureau melted quickly away. The second difficulty lay in
perfecting the local organization of the Bureau throughout the wide
field of work. Making a new machine and sending out officials of
duly ascertained fitness for a great work of social reform is no child’s
task; but this task was even harder, for a new central organization
had to be fitted on a heterogeneous and 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 busy with war
operations,—men in the very nature of the case ill fitted for delicate
social work,—or among the questionable camp followers of an
invading host. Thus, after a year’s work, vigorously as it was pushed,
the problem looked even more difficult to grasp and solve than at the
beginning. Nevertheless, three things that year’s work did, well
worth the doing: it relieved a vast amount of physical suffering; it
transported seven thousand fugitives from congested centres back to
the farm; and, best of all, it inaugurated 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 the quest of
St. Louis seemed to his. Behind the mists of ruin and rapine waved
the calico dresses of women who dared, and after the hoarse
mouthings of the field guns rang the rhythm of the alphabet. Rich
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and poor they were, serious and curious. 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 the white and
black of the South. They did their work well. In that first year they
taught one hundred thousand souls, and more.
Evidently, Congress must soon legislate again on the hastily
organized Bureau, which had so quickly grown into wide
significance and vast possibilities. An institution such as that was
well-nigh as difficult to end as to begin. Early in 1866 Congress took
up the matter, when Senator Trumbull, of Illinois, introduced a bill to
extend the Bureau and enlarge its powers. This measure received, at
the hands of Congress, far more thorough discussion and attention
than its predecessor. The war cloud had thinned enough to allow a
clearer conception of the work of Emancipation. The champions of
the bill argued that the strengthening of the Freedmen’s Bureau was
still a military necessity; that it was needed for the proper carrying
out of the Thirteenth Amendment, and was a work of sheer justice to
the ex-slave, at a trifling cost to the government. The opponents of
the measure declared that the war was over, and the necessity for war
measures past; that the Bureau, by reason of its extraordinary
powers, was clearly unconstitutional in time of peace, and was
destined to irritate the South and pauperize the freedmen, at a final
cost of possibly hundreds of millions. These two arguments were
unanswered, and indeed unanswerable: the one that the extraordinary
powers of the Bureau threatened the civil rights of all citizens; and
the other that the government must have power to do what manifestly
must be done, and that present abandonment of the freedmen meant
their practical reenslavement. The bill which finally passed enlarged
and made permanent the Freedmen’s Bureau. It was promptly vetoed
by President Johnson as “unconstitutional,” “unnecessary,” and
“extrajudicial,” and failed of passage over the veto. Meantime,
however, the breach between Congress and the President began to
broaden, and a modified form of the lost bill was finally passed over
the President’s second veto, July 16.
The act of 1866 gave the Freedmen’s Bureau its final form,—the
form by which it will be known to posterity and judged of men. It
extended the existence of the Bureau to July, 1868; it authorized
additional assistant commissioners, the retention of army officers
mustered out of regular service, the sale of certain forfeited lands to
freedmen on nominal terms, the sale of Confederate public property
for Negro schools, and a wider field of judicial interpretation and
cognizance. The government of the unreconstructed South was thus
put very largely in the hands of the Freedmen’s Bureau, especially as
in many cases the departmental military commander was now made
also assistant commissioner. It was thus that the Freedmen’s Bureau
became a full-fledged government of men. It made laws, executed
them and interpreted them; it laid and collected taxes, defined and
punished crime, maintained and used military force, and dictated
such measures as it thought necessary and proper for the
accomplishment of its varied ends. Naturally, all these powers were
not exercised continuously nor to their fullest extent; and yet, as
General Howard has said, “scarcely any subject that has to be
legislated upon in civil society failed, at one time or another, to
demand the action of this singular Bureau.”
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To understand and criticise intelligently so vast a work, one must

not forget an instant the drift of things in the later sixties. Lee had
surrendered, Lincoln was dead, and Johnson and Congress were at
loggerheads; the Thirteenth Amendment was adopted, the Fourteenth
pending, and the Fifteenth declared in force in 1870. Guerrilla
raiding, the ever-present flickering after-flame of war, was spending
its forces against the Negroes, and all the Southern land was
awakening as from some wild dream to poverty and social
revolution. In a time of perfect calm, amid willing neighbors and
streaming wealth, the social uplifting of four million slaves to an
assured and self-sustaining place in the body politic and economic
would have been a herculean task; but when to the inherent
difficulties of so delicate 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 wept beside Bereavement,—in such a
case, the work of any instrument of social regeneration was in large
part foredoomed to failure. The very name of the Bureau stood for a
thing in the South which for two centuries and better men had
refused even to argue,—that life amid free Negroes was simply
unthinkable, the maddest of experiments.
The agents that the Bureau could command varied all the way
from unselfish philanthropists to narrow-minded busybodies and
thieves; and even though it be true that the average was far better
than the worst, it was the occasional fly that helped spoil the
ointment.
Then amid all crouched the freed slave, bewildered between friend
and foe. He had emerged from slavery,—not the worst slavery in the
world, not a slavery that made all life unbearable, rather a slavery
that had here and there something of kindliness, fidelity, and
happiness,—but withal slavery, which, so far as human aspiration
and desert were concerned, classed the black man and the ox
together. And the Negro knew full well that, whatever their deeper
convictions may have been, Southern men had fought with desperate
energy to perpetuate this slavery under which the black masses, with
half-articulate thought, had writhed and shivered. They welcomed
freedom with a cry. They shrank from the master who still strove for
their chains; they fled to the friends that had freed them, even though
those friends stood ready to use them as a club for driving the
recalcitrant South back into loyalty. So the cleft between the white
and black South grew. Idle to say it never should have been; it was as
inevitable as its results were pitiable. Curiously incongruous
elements were left arrayed against each other,—the North, the
government, the carpet-bagger, and the slave, here; and there, all the
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 period calmly, so intense
was the feeling, so mighty the human passions that swayed and
blinded men. Amid it all, two figures ever stand to typify that day to
coming ages,—the one, a gray-haired gentleman, whose fathers had
quit themselves like men, whose sons lay in nameless graves; who
bowed to the evil of slavery because its abolition threatened untold
ill to all; who stood at last, in the evening of life, a blighted, ruined
form, with hate in his eyes;—and the other, a form hovering dark and

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mother-like, her awful face black with the mists of centuries, had
aforetime quailed at that white master’s command, had bent in love
over the cradles of his sons and daughters, and closed in death the
sunken eyes of his wife,—aye, too, at his behest had laid herself low
to his lust, and borne a tawny man-child to the world, only to see her
dark boy’s limbs scattered to the winds by midnight marauders riding
after “damned Niggers.” These were the saddest sights of that woful
day; and no man clasped the hands of these two passing figures of
the present-past; but, hating, they went to their long home, and,
hating, their children’s children live today.
Here, then, was the field of work for the Freedmen’s Bureau; and
since, with some hesitation, it was continued by the act of 1868 until
1869, let us look upon four years of its work as a whole. There were,
in 1868, nine hundred Bureau officials scattered from Washington to
Texas, ruling, directly and indirectly, many millions of men. The
deeds of these rulers fall mainly under seven heads: the relief of
physical suffering, the overseeing of the beginnings of free labor, the
buying and selling of land, the establishment of schools, the paying
of bounties, the administration of justice, and the financiering of all
these activities.
Up to June, 1869, over half a million patients had been treated by
Bureau physicians and surgeons, and sixty hospitals and asylums had
been in operation. In fifty months twenty-one million free rations
were distributed at a cost of over four million dollars. Next came the
difficult question of labor. First, thirty thousand black men were
transported from the refuges and relief stations back to the farms,
back to the critical trial of a new way of working. Plain instructions
went out from Washington: the laborers must 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 where local
agents differed toto cælo in capacity and character, where the
personnel was continually changing, the outcome was necessarily
varied. The largest element of success lay in the fact that the majority
of the freedmen were willing, even eager, to work. So labor contracts
were written,—fifty thousand in a single State,—laborers advised,
wages guaranteed, and employers supplied. In truth, the organization
became a vast labor bureau,—not perfect, indeed, notably defective
here and there, but on the whole successful beyond the dreams of
thoughtful men. The two great obstacles which confronted the
officials were the tyrant and the idler,—the slaveholder who was
determined to perpetuate slavery under another name; and, the
freedman who regarded freedom as perpetual rest,—the Devil and
the Deep Sea.
In the work of establishing the Negroes as peasant proprietors, the
Bureau was from the first handicapped and at last absolutely
checked. Something was done, and larger things were planned;
abandoned lands were leased so long as they remained in the hands
of the Bureau, and a total revenue of nearly half a million dollars
derived from black tenants. Some other lands to which the nation had
gained title were sold on easy terms, and public lands were opened
for settlement to the very few freedmen who had tools and capital.
But the vision of “forty acres and a mule”—the righteous and
reasonable ambition to become a landholder, which the nation had all

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but categorically promised the freedmen—was destined in most

cases to bitter disappointment. And those men of marvellous
hindsight who are today seeking to preach the Negro back to the
present peonage of the soil know well, or ought to know, that the
opportunity of binding the Negro peasant willingly to the soil was
lost on that day when the Commissioner of the Freedmen’s Bureau
had to go to 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 by 1874 the Georgia Negro alone owned three
hundred and fifty thousand acres of land, it was by grace of his thrift
rather than by bounty of the government.
The greatest success of the Freedmen’s Bureau lay in the planting
of the free school among Negroes, and the idea of free elementary
education among all classes in the South. It not only called the
school-mistresses through the benevolent agencies and built them
schoolhouses, but it helped discover and support such apostles of
human culture as Edmund Ware, Samuel Armstrong, and Erastus
Cravath. The opposition to Negro education in the South was at first
bitter, and showed itself in ashes, insult, and blood; for the South
believed an educated Negro to be a dangerous Negro. And the South
was not wholly wrong; for education among all kinds of men always
has had, and always will have, an element of danger and revolution,
of dissatisfaction and discontent. Nevertheless, men strive to know.
Perhaps some inkling of this paradox, even in the unquiet days of the
Bureau, helped the bayonets allay an opposition to human training
which still to-day lies smouldering in the South, but not flaming.
Fisk, Atlanta, Howard, and Hampton were founded in these days,
and six million dollars were expended for educational work, seven
hundred and fifty thousand dollars of which the freedmen themselves
gave of their poverty.
Such contributions, together with the buying of land and various
other enterprises, showed that the ex-slave was handling some free
capital already. The chief initial source of this was labor in the army,
and his pay and bounty as a soldier. Payments to Negro soldiers were
at first complicated by the ignorance of the recipients, and the fact
that the quotas of colored regiments from Northern States were
largely filled by recruits from the South, unknown to their fellow
soldiers. Consequently, payments were accompanied by such frauds
that Congress, by joint resolution in 1867, put the whole matter in
the hands of the Freedmen’s Bureau. In two years six million dollars
was thus distributed to five thousand claimants, and in the end the
sum exceeded eight million dollars. Even in this system fraud was
frequent; but still 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 the Bureau’s
work lay in the exercise of its judicial functions. The regular Bureau
court consisted of one representative of the employer, one of the
Negro, and one of the Bureau. If the Bureau could have maintained a
perfectly judicial attitude, this arrangement would have been ideal,
and must in time have gained confidence; but the nature of its other
activities and the character of its personnel prejudiced the Bureau in
favor of the black litigants, and led without doubt to much injustice
and annoyance. On the other hand, to leave the Negro in the hands of

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Southern courts was impossible. In a distracted land where slavery

had hardly fallen, to keep the strong from wanton abuse of the weak,
and the weak from gloating insolently over the half-shorn strength of
the strong, was a thankless, hopeless task. The former masters of the
land were peremptorily ordered about, seized, and imprisoned, and
punished over and again, with scant courtesy from army officers. The
former slaves were intimidated, beaten, raped, and butchered by
angry and revengeful men. Bureau courts tended to become centres
simply for punishing whites, while the regular civil courts tended to
become solely institutions for perpetuating the slavery of blacks.
Almost every law and method ingenuity could devise was employed
by the legislatures to reduce the Negroes to serfdom,—to make them
the slaves of the State, if not of individual owners; while the Bureau
officials too often were found striving to put the “bottom rail on top,”
and gave the freedmen a power and independence which they could
not yet use. It is all well enough for us of another generation to wax
wise with advice to those who bore the burden in the heat of the day.
It is full easy now to see that the man who lost 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 about who has seen
his father’s head beaten to a jelly and his own mother namelessly
assaulted, that the meek shall inherit the earth. Above all, nothing is
more convenient than to heap on the Freedmen’s Bureau all the evils
of that evil day, 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; there
was criminal aggression and heedless neglect, but without some
system of control there would have been far more than there was.
Had that control been from within, the Negro would have been re-
enslaved, to all intents and purposes. Coming as the control did from
without, perfect men and methods would have bettered all things;
and even with imperfect agents and questionable methods, the work
accomplished was not undeserving of commendation.
Such was the dawn of Freedom; such was the work of the
Freedmen’s Bureau, which, summed up in brief, may be epitomized
thus: for some fifteen million dollars, beside the sums spent before
1865, and the dole of benevolent societies, this Bureau set going a
system of free labor, established a beginning of peasant
proprietorship, secured the recognition of black freedmen before
courts of law, and founded the free common school in the South. On
the other hand, it failed to begin the establishment of good-will
between ex-masters and freedmen, to guard its work wholly from
paternalistic methods which discouraged self-reliance, and to carry
out to any considerable extent its implied promises to furnish the
freedmen with land. Its successes were the result of hard work,
supplemented by the aid of philanthropists and the eager striving of
black men. Its failures were the result of bad local agents, the
inherent difficulties of the work, and national neglect.
Such an institution, from its wide powers, great responsibilities,
large control of moneys, and generally conspicuous position, was
naturally open to repeated and bitter attack. It sustained a searching

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Congressional investigation at the instance of Fernando Wood in

1870. Its archives and few remaining functions were with blunt
discourtesy transferred from Howard’s control, in his absence, to the
supervision of Secretary of War Belknap in 1872, on the Secretary’s
recommendation. Finally, in consequence of grave intimations of
wrong-doing made by the Secretary and his subordinates, General
Howard was court-martialed in 1874. In both of these trials the
Commissioner of the Freedmen’s Bureau was officially exonerated
from any wilful misdoing, and his work commended. Nevertheless,
many unpleasant things were brought to light,—the methods of
transacting the business of the Bureau were faulty; several cases of
defalcation were proved, and other frauds strongly suspected; there
were some business transactions which savored of dangerous
speculation, if not dishonesty; and around it all lay the smirch of the
Freedmen’s Bank.
Morally and practically, the Freedmen’s Bank was part of the
Freedmen’s Bureau, although it had no legal connection with it. With
the prestige of the government back of it, and a directing board of
unusual respectability and national reputation, this banking
institution had made a remarkable start in the development of that
thrift among black folk which slavery had kept them from knowing.
Then in one sad day came the crash,—all the hard-earned dollars of
the freedmen disappeared; but that was the least of the 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 shiftlessness has
never yet made good. Not even ten additional years of slavery could
have done so much to throttle the thrift of the freedmen as the
mismanagement and bankruptcy of the series of savings banks
chartered by the Nation for their especial aid. Where all the blame
should rest, it is hard to say; whether the Bureau and the Bank died
chiefly by reason of the blows of its selfish friends or the dark
machinations of its foes, perhaps even time will never reveal, for
here lies unwritten history.
Of the foes without the Bureau, the bitterest were those who
attacked not so much its conduct or policy under the law as the
necessity for any such institution at all. Such attacks came primarily
from the Border States 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 and conflict between the white and
black races… by a grant of unconstitutional power.” The argument
gathered tremendous strength South and North; but its very strength
was its weakness. For, argued the plain common-sense of the nation,
if it is unconstitutional, unpractical, and futile for the nation to stand
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 with white votes, we certainly can with black votes. So
justice and force joined hands.
The alternative thus offered the nation was not between full and
restricted Negro suffrage; else every sensible man, black and white,
would easily have chosen the latter. It was rather a choice between
suffrage and slavery, after endless blood and gold had flowed to

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sweep human bondage away. Not a single Southern legislature stood

ready to admit a Negro, under any conditions, to the polls; not a
single Southern legislature believed free Negro labor was possible
without a system of restrictions that took all its freedom away; there
was scarcely a white man in the South who did not honestly regard
Emancipation as a crime, and its practical nullification as a duty. In
such a situation, the granting of the ballot to the black man was a
necessity, the very least a guilty nation could grant a wronged race,
and the only method of compelling the South to accept the results of
the war. Thus Negro suffrage ended a civil war by beginning a race
feud. And some felt gratitude toward the race thus sacrificed in its
swaddling clothes on the altar of national integrity; and some felt and
feel only indifference and contempt.
Had political exigencies been less pressing, the opposition to
government guardianship of Negroes less bitter, and the attachment
to the slave system less strong, the social seer can well imagine a far
better policy,—a permanent Freedmen’s Bureau, with a national
system of Negro schools; a carefully supervised employment and
labor office; a system of impartial protection before the regular
courts; and such institutions for social betterment as savings-banks,
land and building associations, and social settlements. All this vast
expenditure of money and brains might have formed a great school
of prospective citizenship, and solved in a way we have not yet
solved the most perplexing and persistent of the Negro problems.
That such an institution was unthinkable in 1870 was due in part
to certain acts of the Freedmen’s Bureau itself. It came to regard its
work as merely temporary, and Negro suffrage as a final answer to all
present perplexities. The political ambition of many of its agents and
protégés led it far afield into questionable activities, until the South,
nursing its own deep prejudices, came easily to ignore all the good
deeds of the Bureau and hate its very name with perfect hatred. So
the Freedmen’s Bureau died, and its child was the Fifteenth
Amendment.
The passing of a great human institution before its work is done,
like the untimely passing of a single soul, but leaves a legacy of
striving for other men. The legacy of the Freedmen’s Bureau is the
heavy heritage of this generation. To-day, when new and vaster
problems are destined to strain every fibre of the national mind and
soul, would it not be well to count this legacy honestly and carefully?
For this much all men know: despite compromise, war, and struggle,
the Negro is not free. In the backwoods of the Gulf 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 law and
custom to an economic slavery, from which the only escape is death
or the penitentiary. In the most cultured sections and cities of the
South the Negroes are a segregated servile caste, with restricted
rights and privileges. Before the courts, both in law and custom, they
stand on a different and peculiar basis. Taxation without
representation is the rule of their political life. And the result of all
this is, and in nature must have been, lawlessness and crime. That is
the large legacy of the Freedmen’s Bureau, the work it did not do
because it could not.

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I have seen a land right merry with the sun, where children 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,
by which the traveller’s footsteps hasten as they go. On the tainted
air broods fear. Three centuries’ thought has been the raising and
unveiling of that bowed human heart, and now behold a century new
for the duty and the deed. The problem of the Twentieth Century is
the problem of the color-line.

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III.
Of Mr. Booker T. Washington and Others
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 the American Negro
since 1876 is the ascendancy of Mr. Booker T. Washington. It began
at the time when war memories and ideals were rapidly passing; a
day of astonishing commercial development was dawning; a sense of
doubt and hesitation overtook the freedmen’s sons,—then it was that
his leading began. Mr. Washington came, with a simple definite
programme, at the psychological moment when the nation was a
little ashamed of having bestowed so much sentiment on Negroes,
and was concentrating its energies on Dollars. His programme of
industrial education, conciliation of the South, and submission and
silence as to civil and political rights, was not wholly original; the
Free Negroes from 1830 up to war-time had striven to build
industrial schools, and the American Missionary Association had
from the first taught various trades; and Price and others had sought a
way of honorable alliance with the best of the Southerners. But Mr.
Washington first indissolubly linked these things; he put enthusiasm,
unlimited energy, and perfect faith into his programme, and changed
it from a by-path into a veritable Way of Life. And the tale of the
methods by which he did this is a fascinating study of human life.
It startled the nation to hear a Negro advocating such a programme
after many decades of bitter complaint; it startled and won the
applause of the South, it interested and won the admiration of the
North; and after a confused murmur of protest, it silenced if it did not
convert the Negroes themselves.
To gain the sympathy and cooperation of the various elements
comprising the white South was Mr. Washington’s first task; and this,
at the time Tuskegee was founded, seemed, for a black man, well-
nigh impossible. 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
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most notable thing in Mr. Washington’s career. The South interpreted

it in different ways: the radicals received it as a complete surrender
of the demand for civil and political equality; the conservatives, as a
generously conceived working basis for mutual understanding. So
both approved it, and to-day its author is certainly the most
distinguished Southerner since Jefferson Davis, and the one with the
largest personal following.
Next to this achievement comes Mr. Washington’s work in gaining
place and consideration in the North. Others less shrewd and tactful
had 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, so by singular insight he intuitively grasped
the spirit of the age which was dominating the North. And so
thoroughly did he learn the speech and thought of triumphant
commercialism, and the ideals of material prosperity, that the picture
of a lone black boy poring over a French grammar amid the weeds
and dirt of a neglected home soon seemed to him the acme of
absurdities. One wonders what Socrates and St. Francis of Assisi
would say to this.
And yet this very singleness of vision and thorough oneness with
his age is a mark of the successful man. It is as though Nature must
needs make men narrow in order to give them force. So Mr.
Washington’s cult has gained unquestioning followers, his work has
wonderfully prospered, his friends are legion, and his enemies are
confounded. To-day he stands as the one recognized spokesman of
his ten million fellows, and one of the most notable figures in a
nation of seventy millions. One hesitates, therefore, to criticise a life
which, beginning with so little, has done so much. And yet the time
is come when one may speak in all sincerity and utter courtesy of the
mistakes and shortcomings of Mr. Washington’s career, as well as of
his triumphs, without being thought captious or envious, and without
forgetting that it is easier to do ill than well in the world.
The criticism that has hitherto met Mr. Washington has not always
been of this broad character. In the South especially has he had to
walk warily to avoid the harshest judgments,—and naturally so, for
he is dealing with the one subject of deepest sensitiveness to that
section. Twice—once when at the Chicago celebration of the
Spanish-American War he alluded to the color-prejudice that is
“eating away the vitals of the South,” and once when he dined with
President Roosevelt—has the resulting Southern criticism been
violent enough to threaten seriously his popularity. In the North the
feeling has several times forced itself into words, that Mr.
Washington’s counsels of submission overlooked certain elements of
true manhood, and that his educational programme was
unnecessarily narrow. Usually, however, such criticism has not found
open expression, although, too, the spiritual sons of the Abolitionists
have not been prepared to acknowledge that the schools founded
before Tuskegee, by men of broad ideals and self-sacrificing spirit,
were wholly failures or worthy of ridicule. While, then, criticism has
not failed to follow Mr. Washington, yet the prevailing public
opinion of the land has been but too willing to deliver the solution of
a wearisome problem into his hands, and say, “If that is all you and
your race ask, take it.”

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Among his own people, however, Mr. Washington has

encountered the strongest and most lasting opposition, amounting at
times to bitterness, and even today continuing strong and insistent
even though largely silenced in outward expression by the public
opinion of the nation. Some of this opposition is, of course, mere
envy; the disappointment of displaced demagogues and the spite of
narrow minds. But aside from this, there is among educated and
thoughtful colored men in all parts of the land a feeling of deep
regret, sorrow, and apprehension at the wide currency and
ascendancy which some of Mr. Washington’s theories have gained.
These same men admire his sincerity of purpose, and are willing to
forgive much to honest endeavor which is doing something worth the
doing. They cooperate with Mr. Washington as far as they
conscientiously can; and, indeed, it is no ordinary tribute to this
man’s tact and power that, steering as he must between so many
diverse interests and opinions, he so largely retains the respect of all.
But the hushing of the criticism of honest opponents is a
dangerous thing. It leads some of the best of the critics to unfortunate
silence and paralysis of effort, and others to burst into speech so
passionately and intemperately as to lose listeners. Honest and
earnest criticism from those whose interests are most nearly touched,
—criticism of writers by readers,—this is the soul of democracy and
the safeguard of modern society. If the best of the American Negroes
receive by outer pressure a leader whom they had not recognized
before, manifestly there is here a certain palpable gain. Yet there is
also irreparable loss,—a loss of that peculiarly valuable education
which a group receives when by search and criticism it finds and
commissions its own leaders. The way in which this is done is at
once the most elementary and the nicest problem of social growth.
History is but the record of such group-leadership; and yet how
infinitely changeful is its type and character! And of all types and
kinds, what can be more instructive than the leadership of a group
within a group?—that curious double movement where real progress
may be negative and actual advance be relative retrogression. All this
is the social student’s inspiration and despair.
Now in the past the American Negro has had instructive
experience in the choosing of group leaders, founding thus a peculiar
dynasty which in the light of present conditions is worth while
studying. When sticks and stones and beasts form the sole
environment of a people, their attitude is largely one of determined
opposition to and conquest of natural forces. But when to earth and
brute is added an environment of men and 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 action to the
will of the greater group; or, finally, a determined effort at self-
realization and self-development despite environing opinion. The
influence of all of these attitudes at various times can be traced in the
history of the American Negro, and in the evolution of his successive
leaders.
Before 1750, while the fire of African freedom still burned in the
veins of the slaves, there was in all leadership or attempted
leadership but the one motive of revolt and revenge,—typified in the
terrible Maroons, the Danish blacks, and Cato of Stono, and veiling

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all the Americas in fear of insurrection. The liberalizing tendencies

of the latter half of the eighteenth century brought, along with
kindlier relations between black and white, thoughts of ultimate
adjustment and assimilation. Such aspiration was especially voiced
in the earnest songs of Phyllis, in the martyrdom of Attucks, the
fighting of Salem and Poor, the intellectual accomplishments of
Banneker and Derham, and the political demands of the Cuffes.
Stern financial and social stress after the war cooled much of the
previous humanitarian ardor. The disappointment and impatience of
the Negroes at the persistence of slavery and serfdom voiced itself in
two movements. The slaves in the South, aroused undoubtedly by
vague rumors of the Haytian revolt, made three fierce attempts at
insurrection,—in 1800 under Gabriel in Virginia, in 1822 under
Vesey in Carolina, and in 1831 again in Virginia 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 New
York color-prescription led to a withdrawal of Negro communicants
from white churches and the formation of a peculiar socio-religious
institution among the Negroes known as the African Church,—an
organization still living and controlling in its various branches over a
million of men.
Walker’s wild appeal against the trend of the times showed how
the world was changing after the coming of the cotton-gin. By 1830
slavery seemed hopelessly fastened on the South, and the slaves
thoroughly cowed into submission. The free Negroes of the North,
inspired by the mulatto immigrants from the West Indies, began to
change the basis of their demands; they recognized the slavery of
slaves, but insisted that they themselves were freemen, and sought
assimilation and amalgamation with the nation on the same terms
with other men. Thus, Forten and Purvis of Philadelphia, Shad of
Wilmington, Du Bois of New Haven, Barbadoes of Boston, and
others, strove singly and together as men, they said, not as slaves; as
“people of color,” not as “Negroes.” The trend of the times, however,
refused them recognition save in individual and exceptional cases,
considered them as one with all the despised blacks, and they soon
found themselves striving to keep even the rights they formerly had
of voting and working and moving as freemen. Schemes of migration
and colonization arose among them; but these they refused to
entertain, and they eventually turned to the Abolition movement as a
final refuge.
Here, led by Remond, Nell, Wells-Brown, and Douglass, a new
period of self-assertion and self-development dawned. To be sure,
ultimate freedom and assimilation was the ideal before the leaders,
but the assertion of the manhood rights of the Negro by himself was
the main reliance, and John Brown’s raid was the extreme of its
logic. After the war and emancipation, the great form of Frederick
Douglass, the greatest of American Negro leaders, still led the host.
Self-assertion, especially in political lines, was the main programme,
and behind Douglass came Elliot, Bruce, and Langston, and the
Reconstruction politicians, and, less conspicuous but of greater social
significance, Alexander Crummell and Bishop Daniel Payne.
Then came the Revolution of 1876, the suppression of the Negro
votes, the changing and shifting of ideals, and the seeking of new
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lights in the great night. Douglass, in his old age, still bravely stood
for the ideals 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 seemed, not to give up, but to re-state the old
ideals in a form less repugnant to 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 their fellows, had
sought to lead their own people alone, and were usually, save
Douglass, little known outside their race. But Booker T. Washington
arose as essentially the leader not of one race but of two,—a
compromiser between the South, the North, and the Negro. Naturally
the Negroes resented, at first bitterly, signs of compromise which
surrendered their civil and political rights, even though this was to be
exchanged for larger chances of economic development. The rich
and dominating North, however, was not only weary of the race
problem, but was investing largely in Southern enterprises, and
welcomed any method of peaceful cooperation. Thus, by national
opinion, the Negroes began to recognize Mr. Washington’s
leadership; and the voice of criticism was hushed.
Mr. Washington represents in Negro thought the old attitude of
adjustment and submission; but adjustment at such a peculiar time as
to make his programme unique. This is an age of unusual economic
development, and Mr. Washington’s programme naturally takes an
economic cast, becoming a gospel of Work and Money to such an
extent as apparently almost completely to overshadow the higher
aims of life. Moreover, this is an age when the more advanced races
are coming in closer contact with the less developed races, and the
race-feeling is therefore intensified; and Mr. Washington’s
programme practically accepts the alleged inferiority of the Negro
races. Again, in our own land, the reaction from the sentiment of war
time has given impetus to race-prejudice against Negroes, and Mr.
Washington withdraws many of the high demands of Negroes as men
and American citizens. In other periods of intensified prejudice all
the Negro’s tendency to self-assertion has been called forth; at this
period a policy of submission is advocated. In the history of nearly
all other races and peoples the doctrine preached at such crises 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 for it, are not worth civilizing.
In answer to this, it has been claimed that the Negro can survive
only through submission. Mr. Washington distinctly asks that black
people 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 industrial education, and accumulation of wealth, and the
conciliation of the South. This policy has been courageously and
insistently advocated for over fifteen years, and has been triumphant
for perhaps ten years. As a result of this tender of the palm-branch,
what has been the return? In these years there have occurred:
1. The disfranchisement of the Negro.

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2. The legal creation of a distinct status of civil inferiority for the

Negro.
3. The steady withdrawal of aid from institutions for the higher
training of the Negro.
These movements are not, to be sure, direct results of Mr.
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 economic lines if they are deprived of
political rights, made a servile caste, and allowed only the most
meagre chance for developing their exceptional men? If history and
reason give any distinct answer to these questions, it is an emphatic
No. And Mr. Washington thus faces the triple paradox of his career:
1. He is striving nobly to make Negro artisans business men and
property-owners; but it is utterly impossible, under modern
competitive methods, for workingmen and property-owners to
defend their rights and exist without the right of suffrage.
2. He insists on thrift and self-respect, but at the same time
counsels a silent submission to civic inferiority such as is bound to
sap the 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 Negro
common-schools, nor Tuskegee itself, could remain open a day were
it not for teachers trained in Negro colleges, or trained by their
graduates.
This triple paradox in Mr. Washington’s position is the object of
criticism by two classes of colored Americans. One class is
spiritually descended from Toussaint the Savior, through Gabriel,
Vesey, and Turner, and they represent the attitude of revolt and
revenge; they hate the white South blindly and distrust the white race
generally, and so far as they agree on definite action, think that the
Negro’s only hope lies in emigration beyond the borders of the
United States. And yet, by the irony of fate, nothing has more
effectually made this programme seem hopeless than the recent
course of 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 safe from lying and brute force?
The other class of Negroes who cannot agree with Mr. Washington
has hitherto said little aloud. They deprecate the sight of scattered
counsels, of internal disagreement; and especially they dislike
making their just criticism of a useful and earnest man an excuse for
a general discharge of venom from small-minded opponents.
Nevertheless, the questions involved are so fundamental and serious
that it is difficult to see how men like the Grimkes, Kelly Miller, J.
W. E. Bowen, and other representatives of this group, can much
longer be silent. Such men feel in conscience bound to ask of this
nation three things:
1. The right to vote.
2. Civic equality.
3. The education of youth according to ability. They acknowledge
Mr. Washington’s invaluable service in counselling patience and
courtesy in such demands; they do not ask that ignorant black men
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vote when ignorant whites are debarred, or that any reasonable

restrictions in the suffrage should not be applied; they know that the
low social level of the mass of the race is responsible for much
discrimination against it, but they also know, and the nation knows,
that relentless color-prejudice is more often a cause than a result of
the Negro’s degradation; they seek the abatement of this relic of
barbarism, and not its systematic encouragement and pampering by
all agencies of social power from the Associated Press to the Church
of Christ. They advocate, with Mr. Washington, a broad system of
Negro common schools supplemented 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 rested or
can rest on any other basis than that of the well-equipped college and
university, and they insist that there is a demand for a few such
institutions throughout 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 attitude of
conciliation toward the white South; they accept the “Atlanta
Compromise” in its broadest interpretation; they recognize, with him,
many signs of promise, many men of high purpose and fair
judgment, in this section; they know that no easy task has been laid
upon a region already tottering under heavy burdens. But,
nevertheless, they insist that the way to truth and right lies in
straightforward honesty, not in indiscriminate flattery; in praising
those of the South who do well and criticising uncompromisingly
those who do ill; in taking advantage of the opportunities at hand and
urging their fellows to do the same, but at the same time in
remembering that only a firm adherence to their higher ideals and
aspirations will ever keep those ideals within the realm of possibility.
They do not expect that the free right to vote, to enjoy civic rights,
and to be educated, will come in a moment; they do not expect to see
the bias and prejudices of years disappear at the blast of a trumpet;
but they are absolutely certain that the way for a people to gain their
reasonable rights is not by voluntarily throwing them away and
insisting that they do not want them; that the way for a people to gain
respect is not by continually belittling and ridiculing themselves;
that, on the contrary, Negroes must insist continually, in season and
out of season, that voting is necessary to modern manhood, that color
discrimination is barbarism, and that black boys need education as
well as white boys.
In failing thus to state plainly and unequivocally the legitimate
demands of their people, even at the cost of opposing an honored
leader, the thinking classes of American Negroes would shirk a
heavy responsibility,—a responsibility to themselves, a responsibility
to the struggling masses, a responsibility to the darker races of men
whose future depends so largely on this American experiment, but
especially a responsibility to this nation,—this common Fatherland.
It is wrong to encourage a man or a people in evil-doing; it is wrong
to aid and abet a national crime simply because it is unpopular not to
do so. The growing spirit of kindliness and reconciliation between
the North and South after the frightful difference of a generation ago
ought to be a source of deep congratulation to all, and especially to
those whose mistreatment caused the war; but if that reconciliation is
to be marked by the industrial slavery and civic death of those same
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black men, with permanent legislation into a position of inferiority,

then those black men, if they are really men, are called upon by
every consideration of patriotism and loyalty to oppose such a course
by all civilized methods, even though such opposition involves
disagreement with Mr. Booker T. Washington. We have no right to sit
silently by while the inevitable seeds are sown for a harvest of
disaster to our children, black and white.
First, it is the duty of black men to judge the South
discriminatingly. The present generation of Southerners are not
responsible for the 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 South toward Negroes more
nauseating than to the best thought of the South. The South is not
“solid”; it is a land in the ferment of social change, wherein forces of
all kinds are fighting for supremacy; and to praise the ill the South is
today perpetrating is just as wrong as to condemn the good.
Discriminating and broad-minded criticism is what the South needs,
—needs it for the sake of her own white sons and daughters, and for
the insurance of robust, healthy mental and moral development.
Today even the attitude of the Southern whites toward the blacks
is not, as so many assume, in all cases the same; the ignorant
Southerner hates the Negro, the workingmen fear his competition,
the money-makers wish to use him as a laborer, some of the educated
see a menace in his upward development, while others—usually the
sons of the masters—wish to help him to rise. National opinion has
enabled this last class to maintain the Negro common schools, and to
protect the Negro partially in property, life, and limb. Through the
pressure 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 educated who fear the Negro, have
united to disfranchise him, and some have urged his deportation;
while the passions of the ignorant are easily aroused to lynch and
abuse any black man. To praise this intricate whirl of thought and
prejudice is nonsense; to inveigh indiscriminately against “the
South” is unjust; but to use the same breath in praising Governor
Aycock, exposing Senator Morgan, arguing with Mr. Thomas Nelson
Page, and denouncing Senator Ben Tillman, is not only sane, but the
imperative duty of thinking black men.
It would be unjust to Mr. Washington not to acknowledge that in
several instances he has opposed movements in the South which
were unjust to the Negro; he sent memorials to the Louisiana and
Alabama constitutional conventions, he has spoken against lynching,
and in other ways has openly or silently set his influence against
sinister schemes and unfortunate happenings. Notwithstanding this, it
is equally true to assert that on the whole the distinct impression left
by Mr. Washington’s propaganda is, first, that the South is justified in
its present attitude toward the Negro because of the Negro’s
degradation; secondly, that the prime cause of the Negro’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 of these
propositions is a dangerous half-truth. The supplementary truths
must never be lost sight of: first, slavery and race-prejudice are
potent if not sufficient causes of the Negro’s position; second,

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industrial and common-school training were necessarily slow in

planting because they had to await the black teachers trained by
higher institutions,—it being extremely doubtful if any essentially
different development was possible, and certainly a Tuskegee was
unthinkable before 1880; and, third, while it is a great truth to say
that the Negro must strive and strive mightily to help himself, it is
equally true that unless his striving be not simply seconded, but
rather aroused and encouraged, by the initiative of the richer and
wiser environing group, he cannot hope for great success.
In his failure to realize and impress this last point, Mr. Washington
is especially to be criticised. His doctrine has tended to make the
whites, North and South, shift the burden of the Negro problem to
the Negro’s shoulders and stand aside as critical and rather
pessimistic spectators; when in fact the burden belongs to the nation,
and the hands of none of us are clean if we bend not our energies to
righting these great wrongs.
The South ought to be led, by candid and honest criticism, to
assert her better self and do her full duty to the race she has cruelly
wronged and is still wronging. The North—her co-partner in guilt—
cannot salve her conscience by plastering it with gold. We cannot
settle this problem by diplomacy and suaveness, by “policy” alone. If
worse come to worst, can the moral fibre of this country survive the
slow throttling and murder of nine millions of men?
The black men of America have a duty to perform, a duty stern
and delicate,—a forward movement to oppose a part of the work of
their greatest leader. So far as Mr. Washington preaches Thrift,
Patience, and Industrial Training for the masses, we must hold up his
hands and strive with him, rejoicing in his honors and glorying in the
strength of this Joshua called of God and of man to lead the headless
host. But so far as Mr. Washington apologizes for injustice, North or
South, does not rightly value the privilege and duty of voting,
belittles the emasculating effects of caste distinctions, and opposes
the higher training and ambition of our brighter minds,—so far as he,
the South, or the Nation, does this,—we must unceasingly and firmly
oppose them. By every civilized and peaceful method we must strive
for the rights which the world accords to men, clinging unwaveringly
to those great words which the sons of the Fathers would fain forget:
“We hold these truths to be self-evident: That all men are created
equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain
unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit
of happiness.”

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IV.
Of the Meaning of Progress
Willst Du Deine Macht verkünden,
Wähle sie die frei von Sünden,
Steh’n in Deinem ew’gen Haus!
Deine Geister sende aus!
Die Unsterblichen, die Reinen,
Die nicht fühlen, die nicht weinen!
Nicht die zarte Jungfrau wähle,
Nicht der Hirtin weiche Seele!

SCHILLER.

Once upon a time I taught school in the hills of Tennessee, where

the broad dark vale of the Mississippi begins to roll and crumple to
greet the Alleghanies. I was a Fisk student then, and all Fisk men
thought that Tennessee—beyond the Veil—was theirs alone, and in
vacation time 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, seventeen years ago.
First, there was a Teachers’ Institute at the county-seat; and there
distinguished guests of the superintendent taught the teachers
fractions and spelling and other mysteries,—white 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 I wander.
There came a day when all the teachers left the Institute and began
the hunt for schools. I learn from hearsay (for my mother was
mortally afraid of firearms) that the hunting of ducks and bears and
men is wonderfully interesting, but I am sure that the man who has
never hunted a country school has something to learn of the
pleasures of the chase. I see now the white, hot roads lazily rise and
fall and wind before me under the burning July sun; I feel the deep
weariness of heart and limb as ten, eight, six miles stretch
relentlessly ahead; I feel my heart sink heavily as I hear again and
again, “Got a teacher? Yes.” So I walked on and on—horses were too
expensive—until I had wandered beyond railways, beyond stage
lines, to a land of “varmints” and rattlesnakes, where the coming of a

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stranger was 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
had crossed the stream at Watertown, and rested under the great
willows; then I had gone 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 me anxiously that they wanted a
school over the hill; that but once since the war had a teacher been
there; that she herself longed to learn,—and thus she ran on, talking
fast and loud, with much earnestness and energy.
Next morning I crossed the tall round hill, lingered to look at the
blue and yellow mountains stretching toward the Carolinas, then
plunged into the wood, and came out at Josie’s home. It was a dull
frame cottage with four rooms, perched just below the brow of the
hill, amid peach-trees. The father was a quiet, simple soul, calmly
ignorant, with no touch of vulgarity. The mother was different,—
strong, bustling, and energetic, with a quick, restless tongue, and an
ambition to live “like folks.” There was a crowd of children. Two
boys 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 two babies of indefinite age. Then
there was Josie herself. She seemed to be the centre of the family:
always busy at service, or at home, or berry-picking; a little nervous
and inclined to scold, like her mother, yet faithful, too, like her
father. She had about her a certain fineness, the shadow of an
unconscious moral 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, and grew to love them for their honest efforts
to be decent and comfortable, and for their knowledge of their own
ignorance. There was with them no affectation. The mother would
scold the father for being so “easy”; Josie would roundly berate the
boys for carelessness; and all knew that it was a hard thing to dig a
living out of a rocky side-hill.
I secured the school. I remember the day I rode horseback out to
the commissioner’s house with a pleasant young white fellow who
wanted the white school. The road ran down the bed of a stream; the
sun laughed and the 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 is lucky”; but even then fell the awful shadow of the Veil, for
they ate first, then I—alone.
The schoolhouse was a log hut, where Colonel Wheeler used to
shelter his corn. It sat in a lot behind a rail fence and thorn bushes,
near the sweetest of springs. There was an entrance where a door
once was, and within, a massive rickety fireplace; great chinks
between the logs served as windows. Furniture was scarce. A pale
blackboard crouched in the corner. My desk was made of three
boards, reinforced at critical points, and my chair, borrowed from the
landlady, had to be returned every night. Seats for the children—
these puzzled me much. I was haunted by a New England vision of
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neat little desks and chairs, but, alas! the reality was rough plank
benches without backs, and at times without legs. They had the one
virtue of making naps dangerous,—possibly fatal, for the floor was
not to be trusted.
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 saw the growing row of dark solemn faces and bright eager eyes
facing me. First came Josie and her brothers and sisters. The longing
to know, to be a student in the great school at Nashville, hovered like
a star above this child-woman amid her work and worry, and she
studied doggedly. There were the Dowells from their farm over
toward Alexandria,—Fanny, with her smooth black face and
wondering eyes; Martha, brown and dull; the pretty girl-wife of a
brother, and the younger brood.
There were the Burkes,—two brown and yellow lads, and a tiny
haughty-eyed girl. Fat Reuben’s little chubby girl came, with golden
face and old-gold hair, faithful and solemn. ’Thenie was on hand
early,—a jolly, ugly, good-hearted girl, who slyly dipped snuff and
looked after her little bow-legged brother. When her mother could
spare her, ’Tildy came,—a midnight beauty, with starry eyes and
tapering limbs; and her brother, correspondingly homely. And then
the big boys,—the hulking Lawrences; the lazy Neills, unfathered
sons of mother and daughter; Hickman, with a stoop in his shoulders;
and the rest.
There they sat, nearly thirty of them, on the rough benches, their
faces shading from a pale cream to a deep brown, the little feet bare
and swinging, the eyes full of expectation, with here and there a
twinkle of mischief, and the hands grasping Webster’s blue-black
spelling-book. I loved my school, and the fine faith the children had
in the wisdom of their teacher was truly marvellous. We read and
spelled together, wrote a little, picked flowers, sang, and listened to
stories of the world beyond the hill. At times the school would
dwindle away, and I would start out. I would visit Mun Eddings, who
lived in two very dirty rooms, and ask why little Lugene, whose
flaming face seemed ever ablaze with the dark-red hair uncombed,
was absent all last week, or why I missed so often the inimitable rags
of Mack and Ed. Then the father, who worked Colonel Wheeler’s
farm on shares, would tell me how the crops needed the boys; and
the thin, slovenly mother, whose face was pretty when washed,
assured me that Lugene must mind the baby. “But we’ll start them
again next week.” When the Lawrences stopped, I knew that the
doubts of the old folks about book-learning had conquered again, and
so, toiling up the hill, and getting as far into the cabin as possible, I
put Cicero “pro Archia Poeta” into the simplest English with local
applications, and usually convinced them—for a week or so.
On Friday nights I often went home with some of the children,—
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 where he lived; but people said that he would surely fail, and the
“white folks would get it all.” His wife was a magnificent Amazon,
with saffron face and shining hair, uncorseted and barefooted, and
the children were strong and beautiful. They lived in a one-and-a-
half-room cabin in the hollow of the farm, near the spring. The front
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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 and help” myself to
fried chicken and wheat biscuit, “meat” and corn pone, string-beans
and berries. At first I used to be a little alarmed at the approach of
bedtime in the one lone bedroom, but embarrassment was very deftly
avoided. First, all the children nodded and slept, and were stowed
away in one great pile of goose feathers; next, the mother and the
father discreetly slipped away to the kitchen while I went to bed;
then, blowing out the dim light, they retired in the dark. In the
morning all were up and away before I thought of awaking. Across
the road, where fat Reuben lived, they all went outdoors while the
teacher retired, because they did not boast the luxury of a kitchen.
I liked to stay with the Dowells, for they had four rooms and
plenty of good country fare. Uncle Bird had a small, rough farm, all
woods and hills, miles from the big road; but he was full of tales,—
he preached now and then,—and with his children, berries, horses,
and wheat he was happy and 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 was limited 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 peaches, while the
mother bustled and talked: how Josie had bought the sewing-
machine; how Josie worked at service in winter, but that four dollars
a month was “mighty little” wages; how Josie longed to go away to
school, but that it “looked like” they never could get far enough
ahead 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 dull and
humdrum. The girls looked at the hill in wistful longing, and the
boys fretted and haunted Alexandria. Alexandria was “town,”—a
straggling, lazy village of houses, churches, and shops, and an
aristocracy of Toms, Dicks, and Captains. Cuddled on the hill to the
north was the village of the colored folks, who lived in three- or four-
room unpainted cottages, some neat and homelike, and some dirty.
The dwellings were scattered rather aimlessly, but they centred about
the twin temples of the hamlet, the Methodist, and the Hard-Shell
Baptist churches. These, in turn, leaned gingerly on a sad-colored
schoolhouse. Hither my little world wended its crooked way on
Sunday to meet other worlds, and gossip, and wonder, and make the
weekly sacrifice with frenzied priest at the altar of the “old-time
religion.” Then the soft melody and mighty cadences of Negro song
fluttered and thundered.
I have called my tiny community a world, and so its isolation
made it; and yet there was among us but a half-awakened common
consciousness, 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 this caused us to think some thoughts
together; but these, when ripe for speech, were spoken in various
languages. Those whose eyes twenty-five and more years before had
seen “the glory of the coming of the Lord,” saw in every present
hindrance or help a dark fatalism bound to bring all things right in

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His own good time. The mass of those to whom slavery was a dim
recollection of childhood found the world a puzzling thing: it asked
little of them, and they answered with little, and yet it ridiculed their
offering. Such a paradox they could not understand, and therefore
sank into listless indifference, or shiftlessness, or reckless bravado.
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 to an edge by school and story and half-
awakened thought. Ill could they be content, born without and
beyond the World. And their weak wings beat against their barriers,
—barriers of caste, of youth, of life; at last, in dangerous moments,
against everything that opposed even a whim.

The ten years that follow youth, the years when first the realization
comes that life is leading somewhere,—these were the years that
passed after I left my little school. When they were past, I came by
chance once more to the walls of Fisk University, to the halls of the
chapel of melody. 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 to see the homes and the school of
other days, and to learn how life had gone with my 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 feared for Jim.
With a cultured parentage and a social caste to uphold him, he might
have made a venturesome merchant or a West Point cadet. But here
he was, angry with 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 hurled after him. They told
Jim to run away; but he would not run, and the constable came that
afternoon. It grieved Josie, and great awkward John walked nine
miles every day to see his little brother through the bars of Lebanon
jail. At last the two came back together in the dark night. The mother
cooked supper, and Josie 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 with the boys away there was little
to do in the valley. Josie helped them to sell the old farm, and they
moved nearer town. Brother Dennis, the carpenter, built a new house
with six rooms; Josie toiled a year in Nashville, and brought back
ninety dollars to furnish the house and change it to a home.
When the spring came, and the birds twittered, and the stream ran
proud and full, little sister Lizzie, bold and thoughtless, flushed with
the passion of youth, bestowed herself on the tempter, and brought
home a nameless child. Josie shivered and worked on, with the
vision of schooldays all fled, with a face wan and tired,—worked
until, on a summer’s day, some one married 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. The Lawrences
have gone,—father and son forever,—and the other son lazily digs in
the earth to live. A new young widow rents out their cabin to fat
Reuben. Reuben is a Baptist preacher now, but I fear as lazy as ever,
though his cabin has three rooms; and little Ella has grown into a
bouncing woman, and is ploughing corn on the hot hillside. There
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are babies a-plenty, and one half-witted girl. Across the valley is a
house I did not know before, and there I found, rocking one baby and
expecting another, one of my schoolgirls, a daughter 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 thrifty
husband, 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
stones still marked the former site of my poor little cabin, and not far
away, on six weary boulders, perched a jaunty board house, perhaps
twenty by thirty feet, with three windows and a door that locked.
Some of the window-glass was broken, and part of an old iron stove
lay mournfully under the house. I peeped through the window half
reverently, and found things that were more familiar. The blackboard
had grown by about two feet, and the seats were still without backs.
The county owns the lot now, I hear, and every year there is a session
of school. As I sat by the spring and looked on the Old and the New I
felt glad, very glad, and yet—
After two long drinks I started on. There was the great double log-
house on the corner. I remembered the broken, blighted family that
used to live there. The strong, hard face of the mother, with its
wilderness of hair, rose before me. She had driven her husband away,
and while I taught school a strange man lived there, big and jovial,
and people talked. I felt sure that Ben 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,” they say, and he had
cared for little ’Tildy until last spring, when a lover married her. A
hard life the lad had led, toiling for meat, and laughed at because he
was homely and crooked. There was Sam Carlon, an impudent old
skinflint, who had definite notions about “niggers,” and hired Ben a
summer and would not pay him. Then the hungry boy gathered his
sacks together, and in broad daylight went into Carlon’s corn; and
when the hard-fisted farmer set upon him, the angry boy flew at him
like a beast. Doc Burke saved a murder and a lynching that day.
The story reminded me again of the Burkes, and an impatience
seized me to know who won in the battle, Doc or the seventy-five
acres. For it is a hard thing to make a farm out of nothing, even in
fifteen years. So I hurried on, thinking of the Burkes. They used to
have a certain magnificent barbarism about them that I liked. They
were never vulgar, never immoral, but rather rough and primitive,
with an unconventionality that spent itself in loud guffaws, slaps on
the back, and naps in the corner. I hurried by the cottage of the
misborn Neill boys. It was empty, and they were grown into fat, lazy
farm-hands. I saw the home of the Hickmans, but Albert, with his
stooping shoulders, had passed from the world. Then I came to the
Burkes’ gate and peered through; the enclosure looked rough and
untrimmed, and yet there were 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 and swollen to a half-finished six-
room cottage.
The Burkes held a hundred acres, but they were still in debt.
Indeed, the gaunt father who toiled night and day would scarcely be
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happy out of debt, being so used to it. Some day he must stop, for his
massive frame is showing decline. The mother wore shoes, but the
lion-like physique of other days was broken. The children had grown
up. Rob, the image of his father, was loud and rough with laughter.
Birdie, my school baby of six, had grown to a picture of maiden
beauty, tall and tawny. “Edgar is gone,” said the mother, with head
half bowed,—“gone to work in Nashville; he and his father couldn’t
agree.”
Little Doc, the boy born since the time of my school, took me
horseback down the creek next morning toward Farmer Dowell’s.
The road and the stream were battling for mastery, and the stream
had the better of it. We splashed and waded, and the merry boy,
perched behind me, chattered and laughed. He showed me where
Simon Thompson had bought a bit of ground and a home; but his
daughter Lana, a plump, brown, slow girl, was not there. She had
married a man and a farm twenty miles away. We wound on down
the stream till we came 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 that little valley was a strange stillness as I rode up;
for death and marriage had stolen youth and left age and childhood
there. We sat and talked that night after the chores were done. Uncle
Bird was grayer, and his eyes did not see so well, but he was still
jovial. We talked of the acres bought,—one hundred and twenty-five,
—of the new guest-chamber added, of Martha’s marrying. Then we
talked of death: Fanny and Fred were gone; a shadow hung over the
other daughter, and when it lifted she was to go to Nashville to
school. At last we spoke of the neighbors, and as night fell, Uncle
Bird told me how, on a night like that, ’Thenie came wandering back
to her home over yonder, to escape the blows of her husband. And
next morning she died in the home that her little bow-legged brother,
working and saving, had bought for their widowed mother.
My journey was done, and behind me lay hill and dale, and Life
and Death. How shall man measure Progress there where the dark-
faced Josie lies? How many heartfuls of sorrow shall balance a
bushel of wheat? How hard a thing is life to the lowly, and yet how
human and real! And all this life and love and strife and failure,—is
it the twilight of nightfall or the flush of some faint-dawning day?
Thus sadly musing, I rode to Nashville in the Jim Crow car.

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V.
Of the Wings of Atalanta
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 City of a
Hundred Hills, peering out from the shadows of the past into the
promise of the future. I have seen her in the morning, when the first
flush of day had half-roused her; she lay gray and still on the crimson
soil of Georgia; then the blue smoke began to curl from her
chimneys, the tinkle of bell and scream of whistle broke the silence,
the rattle and roar of busy life slowly gathered and swelled, until the
seething whirl of the city seemed a strange thing in a sleepy land.
Once, they say, even Atlanta slept dull and drowsy at the foot-hills
of the Alleghanies, until the iron baptism of war awakened her with
its 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 city rose like a widow and cast away her weeds, and toiled for
her daily bread; toiled steadily, toiled cunningly,—perhaps with some
bitterness, with a touch, of réclame,—and yet with real earnestness,
and real sweat.
It is a hard thing to live haunted by the ghost of an untrue 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
fell on one black day, something was vanquished that deserved to
live, something killed that in justice had not dared to die; to know
that with the Right that triumphed, triumphed something of Wrong,
something sordid and mean, something less than the broadest and
best. All this is bitter hard; and many a man and city and people have
found in it excuse for sulking, and brooding, and listless waiting.
Such are not men of the sturdier make; they of Atlanta turned
resolutely toward the future; and that future held aloft vistas of
purple and gold:—Atlanta, Queen of the cotton kingdom; Atlanta,
Gateway to the Land of the Sun; Atlanta, the new Lachesis, spinner
of web and woof for the world. So the city crowned her hundred hills
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with factories, and stored her shops with cunning handiwork, and
stretched long iron ways to greet the busy Mercury in his coming.
And the Nation talked of her striving.

Perhaps Atlanta was not christened for the winged maiden of 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 three apples of gold in the way. She fled like a
shadow, paused, startled over the first apple, but even as he stretched
his hand, fled again; hovered over the second, then, slipping from his
hot grasp, flew over river, vale, and hill; but as she lingered over the
third, his arms fell round her, and looking on each other, the blazing
passion of their love profaned the sanctuary of Love, and they were
cursed. If Atlanta be not named for Atalanta, she ought to have been.
Atalanta is not the first or the last maiden whom greed of gold has
led to defile the temple of Love; and not maids alone, but men in the
race of life, sink from the high and generous ideals of youth to the
gambler’s code of the Bourse; and in all our Nation’s striving is not
the Gospel of Work befouled by the Gospel of Pay? So common is
this that one-half think it normal; so unquestioned, 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 of America, 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 hard racing; 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 Law and
Order, and above and between all, the Veil of Race. How heavy a
journey for weary feet! what wings must Atalanta have to flit over all
this hollow and hill, through sour wood and sullen water, and by the
red waste of sun-baked clay! How fleet must Atalanta be if she will
not be tempted by gold to profane the Sanctuary!
The Sanctuary of our fathers has, to be sure, few Gods,—some
sneer, “all too few.” There is the thrifty Mercury of New England,
Pluto of the North, and Ceres of the West; and there, too, is the half-
forgotten Apollo of the South, under whose aegis the maiden ran,—
and as she ran she forgot him, even as there in Boeotia Venus was
forgot. She forgot the old ideal of the Southern gentleman,—that
new-world heir of the grace and courtliness of patrician, knight, and
noble; forgot his honor with his foibles, his kindliness with his
carelessness, and stooped to apples of gold,—to men busier and
sharper, thriftier and more unscrupulous. Golden apples are beautiful
—I remember the lawless days of boyhood, when orchards in
crimson and gold tempted me over fence and field—and, too, the
merchant who has dethroned the planter is no despicable parvenu.
Work and wealth are the mighty levers to lift this old new land; thrift
and toil and saving are the highways to new hopes and new
possibilities; and yet the warning is needed lest the wily Hippomenes
tempt Atalanta to thinking that golden apples are the goal of racing,
and not mere incidents by the way.
Atlanta must not lead the South to dream of material prosperity as
the touchstone of all success; already the fatal might of this idea is

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beginning to spread; it is replacing the finer type of Southerner with

vulgar money-getters; it is burying the sweeter beauties of Southern
life beneath pretence and ostentation. For every social ill the panacea
of Wealth has been urged,—wealth to overthrow the remains of the
slave feudalism; wealth to raise the “cracker” Third Estate; wealth to
employ the black serfs, and the prospect 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 Atlanta typifies, but it is
threatening to be true of a world beneath and beyond that world,—
the Black World beyond the Veil. Today it makes little difference to
Atlanta, to the South, what the Negro thinks or dreams or wills. In
the soul-life of the land he is to-day, and naturally will long remain,
unthought of, half forgotten; and yet when he does come to think and
will and do for himself,—and let no man dream that day will never
come,—then the part he plays will not be one of sudden learning, but
words and thoughts he has been taught to lisp in his race-childhood.
To-day the ferment of his striving toward self-realization is to the
strife of the white world like a wheel within a wheel: beyond the Veil
are smaller but like problems of ideals, of leaders and the 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 yet there they are, awaiting student, artist, and seer,—a
field for somebody sometime to discover. Hither has the temptation
of Hippomenes penetrated; already in this smaller world, which now
indirectly and anon directly must influence the larger for good or ill,
the habit is forming of interpreting the world in dollars. The old
leaders of Negro opinion, in the little groups where there is a Negro
social consciousness, are being replaced by new; neither the black
preacher nor the black teacher leads as he did two decades ago. Into
their places are pushing the farmers and gardeners, the well-paid
porters and artisans, the business-men,—all those with property and
money. And with all this change, so curiously parallel to that of the
Other-world, goes too the same inevitable change in ideals. The
South laments to-day the slow, steady disappearance of a certain type
of Negro,—the faithful, courteous slave of other days, with his
incorruptible honesty and dignified humility. He is passing away just
as surely as the old type of Southern gentleman is passing, and from
not dissimilar causes,—the sudden transformation of a fair far-off
ideal of Freedom into the hard reality of bread-winning and the
consequent deification of Bread.
In the Black World, the Preacher and Teacher embodied once 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 danger is that these ideals, with their simple beauty and weird
inspiration, will suddenly sink to a question of cash and a lust for
gold. Here stands this black young Atalanta, girding herself for the
race that must be run; and if her eyes be still toward the hills and sky
as in the days of old, then we may look for noble running; but what if
some ruthless or wily or even thoughtless Hippomenes lay golden
apples before her? What if the Negro people be wooed from a strife
for righteousness, from a love of knowing, to regard dollars as the
be-all and end-all of life? What if to the Mammonism of America be
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added the rising Mammonism of the re-born South, and the

Mammonism of this South be reinforced by the budding
Mammonism of its half-wakened black millions? Whither, then, is
the new-world quest of Goodness and Beauty and Truth gone
glimmering? Must this, and that fair flower of Freedom which,
despite the jeers of latter-day striplings, sprung from our fathers’
blood, must that too degenerate into a dusty quest of gold,—into
lawless lust with Hippomenes?

The hundred hills of Atlanta are not all crowned with factories. On
one, toward the west, the setting sun throws three buildings in bold
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
and peaches; north and south, two plain and stately halls; and in the
midst, half hidden in ivy, a larger building, boldly graceful, sparingly
decorated, and with one low spire. It is a restful group, —one never
looks for more; it is all here, all intelligible. There I live, and there I
hear from day to day the low hum of restful life. In winter’s twilight,
when the red sun glows, I 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 the hurry and laughter of
three hundred young hearts from hall and street, and from the busy
city below,—children all dark and heavy-haired,—to join their clear
young voices in the music of the morning sacrifice. In a half-dozen
class-rooms they gather then,—here to follow the love-song of Dido,
here to listen to the tale of Troy divine; there to wander among the
stars, there to wander among men and nations,—and elsewhere other
well-worn ways of knowing this queer world. Nothing new, no time-
saving devices,—simply old time-glorified methods of delving for
Truth, and searching out the hidden beauties of life, and learning the
good of living. The riddle of existence is the college curriculum that
was laid before the Pharaohs, that was taught in the groves by Plato,
that formed the trivium and quadrivium, and is to-day laid before the
freedmen’s sons by Atlanta University. And this course 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 college will
ever have one goal,—not to earn meat, but to know the end and aim
of that life which meat nourishes.
The vision of life that rises before these dark eyes has in it nothing
mean or selfish. Not at Oxford or at Leipsic, not at Yale or Columbia,
is there an air of higher resolve or more unfettered striving; the
determination to realize for men, both black and white, the broadest
possibilities of life, to seek the better and the best, to spread with
their own hands the Gospel of Sacrifice,—all this is the burden of
their talk and dream. Here, amid a wide desert of caste and
proscription, amid the heart-hurting slights and jars and vagaries of a
deep race-dislike, lies this green oasis, where hot anger cools, and the
bitterness of disappointment is sweetened by the springs and breezes
of Parnassus; and here men may lie and listen, and learn of a future
fuller than the past, and hear the voice of Time:
“Entbehren sollst du, sollst entbehren.”

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They made their mistakes, those who planted Fisk and Howard
and Atlanta before the smoke of battle had lifted; they made their
mistakes, but those mistakes were not the things at which we lately
laughed somewhat uproariously. They were right when they sought
to found a new educational system upon the University: where,
forsooth, shall we ground knowledge 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 of history, from Academus
to Cambridge, the culture of the University has been the broad
foundation-stone on which is built the kindergarten’s A B C.
But these builders did make a mistake in minimizing the gravity of
the problem before them; in thinking it a matter of years and
decades; in therefore building quickly and laying their foundation
carelessly, and lowering the standard of knowing, until they had
scattered haphazard through the South some dozen poorly equipped
high schools and miscalled them universities. They forgot, too, just
as their successors are forgetting, the rule of inequality:—that of the
million black youth, some were fitted to know 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 meant
neither that all should be college men nor all artisans, but that the one
should be made a missionary of culture to an untaught people, and
the other a free workman among serfs. And to seek to make the
blacksmith a scholar is almost 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 teach bread-

winning, or to furnish teachers for the public schools or to be a centre
of polite society; it is, above all, to be the organ of that fine
adjustment between real life and the growing knowledge of life, an
adjustment which forms the secret of civilization. Such an institution
the South of to-day sorely needs. She has religion, earnest, bigoted:
—religion that on both sides the Veil often omits the sixth, seventh,
and eighth commandments, but substitutes a dozen supplementary
ones. She has, as Atlanta shows, growing thrift and love of toil; but
she lacks that broad knowledge of what the world knows and knew
of human living and doing, which she may apply to the thousand
problems of real life to-day confronting her. The need of the South is
knowledge 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, not all the Apples of Hesperides, be they golden and
bejewelled, can save her from the curse of the Boeotian lovers.
The Wings of Atalanta are the coming universities of the South.
They alone can bear the maiden past the temptation of golden fruit.
They will 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? But they will guide her over and beyond them, and
leave her kneeling in the Sanctuary of Truth and Freedom and broad
Humanity, virgin and undefiled. Sadly did the Old South err in
human education, despising the education of the masses, and
niggardly in the support of colleges. Her ancient university
foundations dwindled and withered under the foul breath of slavery;
and even since the war they have fought a failing fight for life in the
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tainted air of social 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’s need 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 conservation of soul from sordid
aims and petty passions! Let us build the Southern university—
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 the temptation of numbers. Why not here, and perhaps
elsewhere, plant deeply and for all time centres of learning and
living, colleges that yearly would send into the life of the South a
few white men and a few black men of broad culture, catholic
tolerance, and trained ability, joining their hands to other hands, and
giving to this squabble of the Races a decent and dignified peace?
Patience, Humility, Manners, and Taste, common schools and
kindergartens, industrial and technical schools, literature and
tolerance,—all these spring from knowledge and culture, the children
of the university. So must men and nations build, not otherwise, not
upside down.

Teach workers to work,—a wise saying; wise when applied to

German boys and American girls; wiser when said of Negro boys, for
they have less knowledge of working and none to teach them. Teach
thinkers to think,—a needed knowledge in a day of loose and
careless logic; and they whose lot is gravest must have the carefulest
training to think aright. If these things are so, how foolish to ask
what is the best education for one or seven or sixty million souls!
shall we teach them trades, or train them in liberal arts? Neither and
both: teach the workers to work and the thinkers to think; make
carpenters of carpenters, and philosophers of philosophers, and fops
of fools. Nor can we pause here. We are training not isolated men but
a living group of men,—nay, a group within a group. And the final
product of our training must be neither a psychologist nor a
brickmason, but a man. And to make 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 the glory 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; by
ceaseless training and education; by founding Right on righteousness
and Truth on the unhampered search for Truth; by founding the
common school on the university, and the industrial school on the
common school; and weaving thus a system, not a distortion, and
bringing a birth, not an abortion.

When night falls on the City of a Hundred Hills, a wind gathers

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 covers it like a pall, while yonder at the University
the stars twinkle above Stone Hall. And they say that yon gray mist

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is the tunic of Atalanta pausing over her golden apples. Fly, my

maiden, fly, for yonder comes Hippomenes!

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VI.
Of the Training of Black Men
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 KHAYYÁM (FITZGERALD).

From the shimmering swirl of waters where many, many thoughts

ago the slave-ship first saw the square tower of Jamestown, have
flowed down to our day three streams of thinking: one swollen from
the larger world here and overseas, saying, the multiplying of human
wants in culture-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 contact of 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 such Life.” To be sure, behind this
thought lurks the afterthought of force and dominion,—the making
of brown men to delve when the temptation of beads and red calico
cloys.
The second thought streaming from the death-ship and the curving
river is the thought of the older South,—the sincere and passionate
belief that somewhere between men and cattle, God created a tertium
quid, and called it a Negro,—a clownish, simple creature, at times
even lovable within its limitations, but straitly foreordained to walk
within the Veil. To be sure, behind the thought lurks the afterthought,
—some of them with favoring chance might become men, but in
sheer self-defence we dare not let them, and we build about them
walls so high, and hang between them and the light a veil so thick,
that they shall not even think of breaking through.
And last of all there trickles down that third and darker thought,—
the thought of the things themselves, the confused, half-conscious
mutter of men who are black and whitened, crying “Liberty,
Freedom, Opportunity—vouchsafe to us, O boastful World, the
chance of living men!” To be sure, behind the thought lurks the
afterthought,—suppose, after all, the World is right and we are less
than men? Suppose this mad impulse within is all wrong, some mock
mirage from the untrue?
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So here we stand among thoughts of human unity, even through

conquest and slavery; the inferiority of black men, even if forced by
fraud; a shriek in the night for the freedom of men who themselves
are not yet sure of their right to demand it. This is the tangle of
thought and afterthought wherein we are called to solve the problem
of training men for life.
Behind all its curiousness, so attractive alike to sage and dilettante,
lie its dim dangers, throwing across us shadows at once grotesque
and awful. Plain it is to us that what the world seeks through desert
and wild we have within our threshold,—a stalwart laboring force,
suited to the semi-tropics; if, deaf to the voice of the Zeitgeist, we
refuse to use and develop these men, we risk poverty and loss. If, on
the other hand, seized by the brutal afterthought, we debauch the race
thus caught in our talons, selfishly sucking their blood and brains in
the future as in the past, what shall save us from national decadence?
Only that saner selfishness, which Education teaches, can find the
rights of all in the whirl of work.
Again, we may decry the color-prejudice of the South, yet it
remains a heavy fact. Such curious kinks of the human mind exist
and must be reckoned with soberly. They cannot be laughed away,
nor always successfully stormed at, nor easily abolished by act of
legislature. And yet they must not be encouraged by being let alone.
They must be recognized as facts, but unpleasant facts; things that
stand in the way of civilization and religion and common decency.
They can be met in but one way,—by the breadth and broadening 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 and untrained minds is to play with mighty
fires; to flout their striving idly is to welcome a harvest of brutish
crime and shameless lethargy in our very laps. The guiding of
thought and the deft coordination of deed is at once the path of honor
and humanity.
And so, in this great question of reconciling three vast and
partially contradictory streams of thought, the one panacea of
Education leaps to the lips of all:—such human training as will best
use the labor of all men without enslaving or brutalizing; such
training as will give us poise to encourage the prejudices that
bulwark society, and to stamp out those that in sheer barbarity deafen
us to the wail of prisoned souls within the Veil, and the mounting
fury of shackled men.
But when we have vaguely said that Education will set this tangle
straight, what have we uttered but a truism? Training for life teaches
living; but what training for the profitable living together of black
men 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 the embellishments of life, and was useless for
ordinary vermin. To-day we have climbed to heights where we would
open at least the outer courts of knowledge to all, display its
treasures to many, and select the few to whom its mystery of 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.
This programme, however, we are sorely puzzled in carrying out
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through that part of the land where the blight of slavery fell hardest,
and where we are dealing with two backward peoples. To make here
in human education that ever necessary combination of the
permanent and the contingent—of the ideal and the practical in
workable equilibrium—has been there, as it ever must be in every
age and place, a matter of infinite experiment and frequent mistakes.
In rough approximation we may point out four varying decades of
work in Southern education since the Civil War. From the close of
the war until 1876, was the period of uncertain groping and
temporary relief. There were army schools, mission schools, and
schools of the Freedmen’s Bureau in chaotic disarrangement seeking
system and co-operation. Then followed ten years of constructive
definite effort toward the building of complete school systems in the
South. Normal schools and colleges were founded for the freedmen,
and teachers trained there to man the public schools. There was the
inevitable tendency of war to underestimate the prejudices of the
master and the ignorance of the slave, and all seemed clear sailing
out of the wreckage of the storm. Meantime, starting in this decade
yet especially developing from 1885 to 1895, began the industrial
revolution of the South. The land saw glimpses of a new destiny and
the stirring of new ideals. The educational system striving to
complete itself saw new obstacles and a field of work ever broader
and deeper. The Negro colleges, hurriedly founded, were
inadequately equipped, illogically distributed, and of varying
efficiency and grade; the normal and high schools were doing little
more than common-school work, and the common schools were
training but a third of the children who ought to be in them, and
training these too often poorly. At the same time the white South, by
reason of its sudden conversion from the slavery ideal, by so much
the more became set and strengthened in its racial prejudice, and
crystallized it into harsh law and harsher custom; while the
marvellous pushing forward of the poor white daily threatened to
take even bread and butter from the mouths of the heavily
handicapped sons of the freedmen. In the midst, then, of the larger
problem of Negro education sprang up the more practical question of
work, the inevitable economic quandary that faces a people in the
transition from slavery to freedom, and especially those who make
that change amid hate and prejudice, lawlessness and ruthless
competition.
The industrial school springing to notice in this decade, but
coming to full recognition in the decade beginning with 1895, was
the proffered answer to this combined educational and economic
crisis, and an answer of singular wisdom and timeliness. From the
very first in nearly all the schools some attention had been given to
training in handiwork, but now was this training first raised to a
dignity that brought it in direct touch with the South’s magnificent
industrial development, and given an emphasis which reminded
black folk that before the Temple of Knowledge swing the Gates of
Toil.
Yet after all they are but gates, and when turning our eyes from the
temporary and the contingent in the Negro problem to the broader
question of the permanent uplifting and civilization of black men in
America, we have a right to inquire, as this enthusiasm for material

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advancement mounts to its height, if after all the industrial school is

the final and sufficient answer in the training of the Negro race; and
to ask gently, but in all sincerity, 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 eagerly because of sinister signs in
recent educational movements. The tendency is here, born of slavery
and quickened to renewed life by the crazy imperialism of the day, to
regard human beings as among the material resources of a land to be
trained with an eye single to future dividends. Race-prejudices,
which keep brown and black men in their “places,” we are coming to
regard as useful allies with such a theory, no matter how much they
may dull the ambition and sicken the hearts of struggling human
beings. And above all, we daily hear that an education that
encourages aspiration, that sets the loftiest of ideals and seeks as an
end culture and character rather than bread-winning, is the privilege
of white men and the danger and delusion of black.
Especially has criticism been directed against the former
educational efforts to aid the Negro. In the four periods I have
mentioned, we find first, boundless, planless enthusiasm and
sacrifice; then the preparation of teachers for a vast public-school
system; then the launching and expansion of that school system amid
increasing difficulties; and finally the training of workmen for the
new and growing industries. This development has been sharply
ridiculed as a logical anomaly and flat reversal of nature. Soothly we
have been told that first industrial and manual training should have
taught the Negro to work, then simple schools should have taught
him to read and write, and finally, after years, high and normal
schools could have completed the system, as intelligence and wealth
demanded.
That a system logically so complete was historically impossible, it
needs but a little thought to prove. Progress in human affairs is more
often a pull than a push, a surging forward of the exceptional man,
and the lifting of his duller brethren slowly and painfully to his
vantage-ground. Thus it was no accident that gave birth to
universities centuries before the common schools, that made fair
Harvard the first flower of our wilderness. So in the South: the mass
of the freedmen at the end of the war lacked the intelligence so
necessary to modern workingmen. They must first have the common
school to teach them to read, write, and cipher; and they must have
higher schools to teach teachers for the common schools. The white
teachers who flocked South went to establish such a common-school
system. Few held the idea of founding colleges; most of them at first
would have laughed at the idea. But they faced, as all men since
them have faced, that central paradox of the South,—the social
separation of the races. At that time it was the sudden volcanic
rupture of nearly all relations between black and white, in work and
government and family life. Since then a new adjustment of relations
in economic and political affairs has grown up,—an adjustment
subtle and difficult to grasp, yet singularly ingenious, which leaves
still that frightful chasm at the color-line across which men pass at
their peril. Thus, then and now, there stand in the South two separate
worlds; and separate not simply in the higher realms of social
intercourse, but also in church and school, on railway and street-car,
in hotels and theatres, in streets and city sections, in books and
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newspapers, in asylums and jails, in hospitals and graveyards. There

is still enough of contact for large economic and group cooperation,
but the separation is so thorough and deep that it absolutely
precludes for the present between the races anything like that
sympathetic and effective group-training and leadership of the one
by the other, such as the American Negro and all backward peoples
must have for effectual progress.
This the missionaries of ’68 soon saw; and if effective industrial
and trade schools were impracticable before the establishment of a
common-school system, just as certainly no adequate common
schools could be founded until there were teachers to teach them.
Southern whites would not teach them; Northern whites in sufficient
numbers could not be had. If the Negro was to learn, he must teach
himself, and the most effective help that could be given him was the
establishment of schools to train Negro teachers. This conclusion
was slowly but surely reached by every student of the situation until
simultaneously, in widely separated regions, without consultation or
systematic plan, there arose a series of institutions designed to
furnish teachers for the untaught. Above the sneers of critics at the
obvious defects of this procedure must ever stand its one crushing
rejoinder: in a single generation they put thirty thousand black
teachers in the South; they wiped out the illiteracy of the majority of
the black people of the land, and they made Tuskegee possible.
Such higher training-schools tended naturally to deepen broader
development: at first they were common and grammar schools, then
some became high schools. And finally, by 1900, some thirty-four
had one year or more of studies of college grade. This development
was reached with different degrees of speed in different institutions:
Hampton is still a high school, while Fisk University started her
college in 1871, and Spelman Seminary about 1896. In all cases the
aim was identical,—to maintain the standards of the lower training
by giving teachers and leaders the best practicable training; and
above all, to furnish the black world with adequate standards of
human culture and lofty ideals of life. It was not enough that the
teachers of teachers should be trained in technical normal methods;
they must also, so far as possible, be broad-minded, cultured men
and women, to scatter civilization among a people whose ignorance
was not simply of letters, but of life itself.
It can thus be seen that the work of education in the South began
with higher institutions of training, which threw off as their foliage
common schools, and later industrial schools, and at the same time
strove to shoot their roots ever deeper toward college and university
training. That this was an inevitable and necessary development,
sooner or later, goes without saying; but there has been, and still is, a
question in many minds if the natural growth was not forced, and if
the higher training was not either overdone or done with cheap and
unsound methods. Among white Southerners this feeling is
widespread and positive. A prominent Southern journal voiced this in
a recent editorial.

“The experiment that has been made to give the

colored students classical training has not been
satisfactory. Even though many were able to pursue the

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course, most of them did so in a parrot-like way,

learning what was taught, but not seeming to
appropriate the truth and import of their instruction,
and graduating without sensible aim or valuable
occupation 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 as extreme and

overdrawn, still without doubt many are asking, Are there a sufficient
number of Negroes ready for college training to warrant the
undertaking? Are not too many students prematurely forced into this
work? Does it not have the effect of dissatisfying the young Negro
with his environment? And do these graduates succeed in real life?
Such natural questions cannot be evaded, nor on the other hand must
a Nation naturally skeptical as to Negro ability assume an
unfavorable answer without careful inquiry and patient openness to
conviction. We must not forget that most Americans answer all
queries regarding the Negro a priori, and that the least that human
courtesy can do is to listen to evidence.
The advocates of the higher education of the Negro would be the
last to deny the incompleteness and glaring defects of the present
system: too many institutions have attempted to do college work, the
work in some cases has not been thoroughly done, and quantity
rather than quality has sometimes been sought. But all this can be
said of higher education throughout the land; it is the almost
inevitable incident of educational growth, and leaves the deeper
question of the legitimate demand for the higher training of Negroes
untouched. And this latter question can be settled in but one way,—
by a first-hand study of the facts. If we leave out of view all
institutions which have not actually graduated students from a course
higher than that of a New England high school, even though they be
called colleges; if then we take the thirty-four remaining institutions,
we may clear up many misapprehensions 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, including Atlanta,
Fisk, and Howard, Wilberforce and Claflin, Shaw, and the rest, is
peculiar, almost unique. Through the shining trees that whisper
before me as I write, I catch glimpses of a boulder of New England
granite, covering a grave, which graduates of Atlanta University have
placed there,—

“IN 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: not alms, but
a friend; not cash, but character. It was not and is not money these
seething millions want, but love and sympathy, the pulse of hearts
beating with red blood;—a gift which to-day only their own kindred
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and race can bring to the masses, but which once saintly souls
brought to their favored children in the crusade of the sixties, that
finest thing in American history, and one of the few things untainted
by sordid greed and cheap vainglory. The teachers in these
institutions came not to keep the Negroes in their place, but to raise
them out of the defilement of the places where slavery had wallowed
them. The colleges they founded were social settlements; homes
where the best of the sons of the freedmen came in close and
sympathetic touch with the best traditions of New England. They
lived and ate together, studied and worked, hoped and harkened in
the dawning light. In actual formal content their curriculum was
doubtless old-fashioned, but in educational power it was supreme,
for it was the contact of living souls.
From such schools about two thousand Negroes have gone forth
with the bachelor’s degree. The number in itself is enough to put at
rest the argument that too large a proportion of Negroes are receiving
higher training. If the ratio to population of all Negro students
throughout the land, in both college and secondary training, be
counted, Commissioner Harris assures us “it must be increased to
five times its present average” to equal the average of the land.
Fifty years ago the ability of Negro students in any appreciable
numbers to master a modern college course would have been difficult
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 the bachelor’s degree from Harvard, Yale, Oberlin, and
seventy other leading colleges. Here we have, then, nearly twenty-
five hundred Negro graduates, of whom the crucial query must be
made, How far did their training fit them for life? It is of course
extremely difficult to collect satisfactory data on such a point,—
difficult to reach the men, to get trustworthy testimony, and to gauge
that testimony by any generally acceptable criterion of success. In
1900, the Conference at Atlanta University undertook to study these
graduates, and published the results. First they sought to know what
these graduates were doing, and succeeded in getting answers from
nearly two-thirds of the living. The direct testimony was in almost all
cases corroborated by the reports of the colleges where they
graduated, so that in the main the reports were worthy of credence.
Fifty-three per cent of these graduates were teachers,—presidents of
institutions, heads of normal schools, principals of city school-
systems, and the like. Seventeen per cent were clergymen; another
seventeen per cent were in the professions, chiefly as physicians.
Over six per cent were merchants, farmers, and artisans, and four per
cent were in the government civil-service. Granting even that a
considerable proportion of the third unheard from are unsuccessful,
this is a record of usefulness. Personally I know many hundreds of
these graduates, and have corresponded with more than a thousand;
through others I have followed carefully the life-work of scores; I
have taught some of them and some of the pupils whom they have
taught, lived in homes which they have builded, and looked at life
through their eyes. Comparing them as a class with my fellow
students in New England and in Europe, I cannot hesitate in saying
that nowhere have I met men and women with a broader spirit of
helpfulness, with deeper devotion to their life-work, or with more
consecrated determination to succeed in the face of bitter difficulties
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than among Negro college-bred men. They have, to be sure, their

proportion of ne’er-do-wells, their pedants and lettered fools, but
they have a surprisingly small proportion of them; they have not that
culture of manner which we instinctively associate with university
men, forgetting that in reality it is the heritage from cultured homes,
and that no people a generation removed from slavery can escape a
certain 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 seldom been
agitators, have withstood the temptation to head the mob, and have
worked steadily and faithfully in a thousand communities in the
South. As teachers, they have given the South a commendable
system of city schools and large numbers of private normal-schools
and academies. Colored college-bred men have worked side by side
with white college graduates at Hampton; almost from the beginning
the backbone of Tuskegee’s teaching force has been formed of
graduates from Fisk and Atlanta. And to-day the institute is filled
with college graduates, from the energetic wife of the principal down
to the teacher of agriculture, including nearly half of the executive
council and a majority of the heads of departments. In the
professions, college men are slowly but surely leavening the Negro
church, are healing and preventing the devastations of disease, and
beginning to furnish legal protection for the liberty and property of
the toiling masses. All this is needful work. Who would do it if
Negroes did not? How could Negroes do it if they were not trained
carefully for it? If white people need colleges to furnish teachers,
ministers, lawyers, and doctors, do black people need nothing of the
sort?
If it is true that there are an appreciable number of Negro youth in
the land capable by character and talent to receive that higher
training, the end of which is culture, and if the two and a half
thousand who have had something of this training in the past have in
the main proved themselves useful to their race and generation, the
question then comes, What place in the future development of the
South ought the Negro college and college-bred man to occupy? That
the present social separation and acute race-sensitiveness must
eventually yield to the influences of culture, as the South grows
civilized, is clear. But such transformation calls for singular wisdom
and patience. If, while the healing of this vast sore is progressing, the
races are to live for many years side by side, united in economic
effort, obeying a common government, sensitive to mutual thought
and feeling, yet subtly and silently separate in many matters of
deeper human intimacy,—if this unusual and dangerous development
is to progress amid peace and order, mutual respect and growing
intelligence, it will call for social surgery at once the delicatest and
nicest in modern history. It will demand broad-minded, upright men,
both white and black, and in its final accomplishment American
civilization will triumph. So far as white men are concerned, this fact
is to-day being recognized in the South, and a happy renaissance of
university education seems imminent. But the very voices that cry
hail to this good work are, strange to relate, largely silent or
antagonistic to the higher education of the Negro.

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Strange to relate! for this is certain, no secure civilization can be

built in the South with the Negro as an ignorant, turbulent proletariat.
Suppose we seek to remedy this by making them laborers and
nothing more: they are not fools, they have tasted of the Tree of Life,
and they will not 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 door of opportunity in the faces of their
bolder and brighter minds, will you make them satisfied with their
lot? or will you not rather transfer their leading from the hands of
men taught to think to the hands of untrained demagogues? We ought
not to forget that despite the pressure of poverty, and despite the
active discouragement and even ridicule of friends, the demand for
higher training steadily increases among Negro youth: there were, in
the years from 1875 to 1880, 22 Negro graduates from Northern
colleges; 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; by refusing to give this Talented Tenth
the key to knowledge, can any sane man imagine that they will
lightly lay aside their yearning and contentedly become hewers of
wood and drawers of water?
No. The dangerously clear logic of the Negro’s position will more
and more loudly assert itself in that day when increasing wealth and
more intricate social organization preclude the South from being, as
it so largely is, simply an armed camp for intimidating black folk.
Such waste of energy cannot be spared if the South is to catch up
with civilization. And as the black third of the land grows in thrift
and skill, unless skilfully guided in its larger philosophy, it must
more and more brood over the red past and the creeping, crooked
present, until it grasps a gospel of revolt and revenge and throws its
new-found energies athwart the current of advance. Even to-day the
masses of the Negroes see all too clearly the anomalies of their
position and the moral crookedness of yours. You may marshal
strong indictments against them, but their counter-cries, lacking
though they be in formal logic, have burning truths within them
which you may not wholly ignore, O Southern Gentlemen! If you
deplore their presence here, they ask, Who brought us? When you
cry, Deliver us from the vision of intermarriage, they answer that
legal marriage is infinitely better than systematic concubinage and
prostitution. And if in just fury you accuse their vagabonds of
violating women, they also in fury quite as just may reply: The rape
which your gentlemen have done against helpless black women in
defiance of your own laws is written on the foreheads of two millions
of mulattoes, and written in ineffaceable blood. And finally, when
you fasten crime upon this race as its peculiar trait, they answer that
slavery 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 land receive most unceasing condemnation, North, East,
South, and West.
I will not say such arguments are wholly justified,—I will not
insist that there is no other side to the shield; but I do say that of the
nine millions of Negroes in this nation, there is scarcely one out of
the cradle to whom these arguments do not daily present themselves
in the guise of terrible truth. I insist that the question of the future is
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how best to keep these millions from brooding over the wrongs of
the past and the difficulties of the present, so that all their energies
may be bent toward a cheerful striving and cooperation with their
white neighbors toward a larger, juster, and fuller future. That one
wise method of doing this lies in the closer knitting of the Negro to
the great industrial possibilities of the South is a great truth. And this
the common schools and the manual training and trade schools are
working to accomplish. But these alone are not enough. The
foundations of knowledge in this race, as in others, must be sunk
deep in the college and university if we would build a solid,
permanent structure. Internal problems 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
meet and solve largely for himself, by reason of his isolation; and
can there be any possible solution other than by study and thought
and an appeal to the rich experience 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 shallow thinking than from
over-education and over-refinement? Surely we have wit enough to
found a Negro college so manned and equipped as to steer
successfully between the dilettante and the fool. We shall hardly
induce black men to believe that if their stomachs be full, it matters
little about their brains. They already dimly perceive that the paths of
peace winding between honest toil and dignified manhood call for
the guidance of skilled thinkers, the loving, reverent comradeship
between the black lowly and the black men emancipated by training
and culture.
The function of the Negro college, then, is clear: it must maintain
the standards of popular education, it must seek the social
regeneration of the Negro, and it must help in the solution of
problems of race contact and cooperation. And finally, beyond all
this, it must develop men. Above our modern socialism, and out of
the worship of the mass, must persist and evolve that higher
individualism which the centres of culture protect; there must come a
loftier respect for the sovereign human soul that seeks to know itself
and the 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 and new. Such souls aforetime have
inspired and guided worlds, and if we be not wholly bewitched by
our Rhinegold, they shall again. Herein the longing of black men
must have respect: the rich and bitter depth of their experience, the
unknown treasures of their inner life, the strange rendings of nature
they have seen, may give the world new points of view and make
their loving, living, and doing precious to all human hearts. And to
themselves in these the days that try their souls, the chance to soar in
the dim blue air above the smoke is to their finer spirits boon and
guerdon for what they lose on earth by being black.
I sit with Shakespeare and he winces not. Across the color line I
move arm in arm with Balzac and Dumas, where smiling men and
welcoming women glide in gilded halls. From out the caves of
evening that swing between the strong-limbed earth and the tracery
of the stars, I summon Aristotle and Aurelius and what soul I will,
and they come all graciously with no scorn nor condescension. So,
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wed with Truth, I dwell above the Veil. Is this the life you grudge us,
O knightly America? Is this the life you long to change into the dull
red hideousness of Georgia? Are you so afraid lest peering from this
high Pisgah, between Philistine and Amalekite, we sight the
Promised Land?

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VII.
Of the Black Belt
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 see the
crimson soil of Georgia stretching away bare and monotonous right
and left. Here and there lay straggling, unlovely villages, and lean
men loafed leisurely at the depots; then again came the stretch of
pines and clay. Yet we did not nod, nor weary of the scene; for this is
historic ground. Right across our track, three hundred and sixty years
ago, wandered the cavalcade of Hernando de Soto, looking for gold
and the Great Sea; and he and his foot-sore captives disappeared
yonder in the grim forests to the west. Here sits Atlanta, the city of a
hundred hills, with something Western, something Southern, and
something quite its own, in its busy life. Just this side Atlanta is the
land of the Cherokees and to the southwest, not far from where Sam
Hose was crucified, you may stand on a spot which is to-day the
centre of the Negro problem,—the centre of those nine million men
who are America’s dark heritage from slavery and the slave-trade.
Not only is Georgia thus the geographical focus of our Negro
population, but in many other respects, both now and yesterday, the
Negro problems have seemed to be centered in this State. No other
State in the Union can count a million Negroes among its citizens,—
a population as large as the slave population of the whole Union in
1800; no other State fought so long and strenuously to gather this
host of Africans. Oglethorpe thought slavery against law and gospel;
but the circumstances which gave Georgia its first inhabitants were
not calculated to furnish citizens over-nice in their ideas about rum
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and slaves. Despite the prohibitions of the trustees, these Georgians,

like some of their descendants, proceeded to take the law into their
own hands; and so pliant were the judges, and so flagrant the
smuggling, and so earnest were the prayers of Whitefield, that by the
middle of the eighteenth century all restrictions were swept away,
and the slave-trade went merrily on for fifty years and more.
Down in Darien, where the Delegal riots took place some
summers ago, there used to come a strong protest against slavery
from the Scotch Highlanders; and the Moravians of Ebenezer did not
like the system. But not 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 Africans poured in!—fifty thousand
between 1790 and 1810, and then, from Virginia and from
smugglers, two thousand a year for many years more. So the thirty
thousand Negroes of Georgia in 1790 doubled in a decade,—were
over a hundred thousand in 1810, had reached two hundred thousand
in 1820, and half a million at the time of the war. Thus like a snake
the black population writhed upward.
But we must hasten on our journey. This that we pass as we near
Atlanta is the ancient land of the Cherokees,—that brave Indian
nation which strove so long for its fatherland, until Fate and the
United States Government drove them beyond the Mississippi. If you
wish to ride with me you must 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 in there. 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 and comfortable. The
discomfort lies chiefly in the hearts of those four black men yonder
—and in mine.
We rumble south in quite a business-like way. The bare red clay
and pines of Northern Georgia begin to disappear, and in their place
appears a rich rolling land, luxuriant, and here and there well tilled.
This is the 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 mills rise on every side. Below Macon the
world grows darker; for now we approach the Black Belt,—that
strange land of shadows, at which even slaves paled in the past, and
whence come now only faint and half-intelligible murmurs to the
world beyond. The “Jim Crow Car” grows larger and a shade better;
three rough field-hands and two or three white loafers accompany us,
and the newsboy still spreads his wares at one end. The sun is
setting, but we can see the great cotton country as we enter it,—the
soil now dark and fertile, now thin and gray, with fruit-trees and
dilapidated buildings,—all the way to Albany.
At Albany, in the heart of the Black Belt, we stop. Two hundred
miles south of Atlanta, two hundred miles west of the Atlantic, and
one hundred miles north of the Great Gulf lies Dougherty County,
with ten thousand Negroes and two thousand whites. The Flint River
winds down from Andersonville, and, turning suddenly at Albany,
the county-seat, hurries on to join the Chattahoochee and the sea.
Andrew Jackson knew the Flint well, and marched across 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 that
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followed this campaign, all Dougherty County, and much 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
those days. The panic of 1837, which Jackson bequeathed to Van
Buren, turned the planters from the impoverished lands of Virginia,
the Carolinas, and east Georgia, toward the West. The Indians were
removed to Indian Territory, and settlers poured into these coveted
lands to retrieve their broken fortunes. For a 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 sun and
damp with the rich black swamp-land; and here the corner-stone of
the Cotton 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,—
whites usually to the north, and blacks to the south. Six days in the
week the town looks decidedly too small for itself, and takes frequent
and prolonged naps. But on Saturday suddenly the whole county
disgorges itself upon the place, and a perfect flood of black peasantry
pours through the streets, fills the stores, blocks the sidewalks,
chokes the thoroughfares, and takes full possession of the town. They
are black, sturdy, uncouth country folk, good-natured and simple,
talkative to a degree, and yet far more silent and brooding than the
crowds of the Rhine-pfalz, or Naples, or Cracow. They drink
considerable quantities of whiskey, but do not get very drunk; they
talk and laugh loudly at times, but seldom quarrel or fight. They walk
up and down the streets, meet and gossip with friends, stare at the
shop windows, buy coffee, cheap candy, and clothes, and at dusk
drive home—happy? well no, not exactly happy, but much happier
than as though they had not come.
Thus Albany is a real capital,—a typical Southern county town,
the centre of the life of ten thousand souls; their point of contact with
the outer world, their centre of news and gossip, their market for
buying 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 we illustrated city life as that of a closely crowded
country district. Now the world has well-nigh forgotten what the
country is, and we must imagine a little city of black people 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 of sand and gloomy soil.
It gets pretty hot in Southern Georgia in July,—a sort of dull,
determined heat that seems quite independent of the sun; so it took us
some days to muster courage enough to leave the porch and venture
out on the long 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 jogged leisurely southward in the valley of the
Flint. We passed the scattered box-like cabins of the brickyard hands,
and the long tenement-row facetiously called “The Ark,” and were
soon in the open country, and on the confines of the great plantations
of other days. There is the “Joe Fields place”; a rough old fellow was
he, and had killed many a “nigger” in his day. Twelve miles his
plantation used to run,—a regular barony. It is nearly all gone now;
only straggling bits belong to the family, and the rest has passed to

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Jews and Negroes. Even the bits which are left 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. This distressingly new board house is his, and he has just
moved out of yonder moss-grown cabin with its one square room.
From the curtains in Benton’s house, down the road, a dark
comely face is staring at the strangers; for passing carriages are not
every-day occurrences here. Benton is an intelligent yellow man with
a good-sized family, and manages a plantation blasted by the war and
now the broken staff of the widow. He might be well-to-do, they say;
but he carouses too much in Albany. And the half-desolate spirit of
neglect born of the very soil seems to have settled on these acres. In
times past there were cotton-gins and machinery here; but they have
rotted away.
The whole land seems forlorn and forsaken. Here are the remnants
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
wholly disappeared; the fences have flown, and the families are
wandering in the world. Strange vicissitudes have met these whilom
masters. Yonder stretch the wide acres of Bildad Reasor; he died in
war-time, but the upstart overseer hastened to wed the widow. Then
he went, and his neighbors too, and now only the black tenant
remains; but the shadow-hand of the master’s grand-nephew or
cousin or creditor stretches out of the gray distance to collect the
rack-rent remorselessly, and so the land is uncared-for and poor.
Only black tenants can stand such a system, and they only because
they must. Ten miles we have ridden to-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 the Cotton
Kingdom,—the shadow of a marvellous dream. And where is the
King? Perhaps this is he,—the sweating ploughman, tilling his eighty
acres with two 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 in view,—a neat cottage snugly
ensconced by the road, and near it a little store. A tall bronzed man
rises from the porch as we hail him, and comes out to our 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
forty acres. “The land is run down since the boom-days of eighteen
hundred and fifty,” he explains, and cotton is low. Three black
tenants live on his place, 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 just installed. Three hundred bales of
cotton went through it last year. Two children he has sent away to
school. Yes, he says sadly, he is getting on, but cotton is down to four
cents; I know how Debt sits staring at him.
Wherever the King may be, the parks and palaces of the Cotton
Kingdom have not wholly disappeared. We plunge even now into
great groves of oak and towering pine, with an undergrowth of
myrtle and shrubbery. This was the “home-house” of the Thompsons,
—slave-barons who drove their coach and four in the merry past. All
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is silence now, and ashes, and tangled weeds. The owner put his
whole fortune into the rising cotton industry of the fifties, and with
the falling prices of the eighties he packed up and stole away. Yonder
is another grove, with unkempt lawn, great magnolias, and grass-
grown paths. The Big House stands in half-ruin, its great front door
staring blankly at the street, and the back part grotesquely restored
for its black tenant. A shabby, well-built Negro he is, unlucky and
irresolute. He digs hard to pay rent to the white girl who owns the
remnant of the place. She married a policeman, and lives in
Savannah.
Now and again we come to churches. Here is one now,—
Shepherd’s, they call it,—a great whitewashed barn of a thing,
perched on stilts of stone, and looking for all the world as though it
were just resting here a moment and might be expected to waddle off
down the road at almost any time. And yet it is the centre of a
hundred cabin homes; and sometimes, of a Sunday, five hundred
persons from far and near gather here and talk and eat and sing.
There is a schoolhouse near,—a very airy, empty shed; but even this
is an improvement, for usually the school is held in the church. The
churches vary from log-huts to those like Shepherd’s, and the schools
from nothing to this little house that sits demurely on the county line.
It is a tiny plank-house, perhaps ten by twenty, and has within a
double row of rough unplaned benches, resting mostly on legs,
sometimes on boxes. Opposite the door is a square home-made desk.
In one corner are the ruins of a stove, and in the other a dim
blackboard. It is the cheerfulest schoolhouse I have seen in
Dougherty, save in town. Back of the schoolhouse is a lodgehouse
two stories high and not quite finished. Societies meet there,—
societies “to care for the sick and bury the dead”; and these societies
grow and flourish.
We had come to the boundaries of Dougherty, and were about to
turn west along the county-line, when all these sights were pointed
out to us by a kindly old man, black, white-haired, and seventy.
Forty-five years he had lived here, and now supports himself and his
old wife by the help of the steer tethered yonder and the charity of
his black neighbors. He shows us the farm of the Hills just across the
county line in Baker,—a widow and two 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-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.
Great dismantled trunks of pines tower above the green cottonfields,
cracking their naked gnarled fingers toward the border of living
forest beyond. There is little 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 no hammocks or easy-
chairs, and few flowers. So when, as here at Rawdon’s, one sees a
vine clinging to a little porch, and home-like windows peeping over
the fences, one takes a long breath. I think I never before quite
realized the place of the Fence in civilization. This is the Land of the
Unfenced, where crouch on either hand scores of ugly one-room
cabins, cheerless and dirty. Here lies 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, and then we know
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a touch of culture is near. Of course Harrison Gohagen,—a quiet

yellow man, young, smooth-faced, and diligent,—of course he is lord
of some hundred acres, and we expect to see a vision of well-kept
rooms and fat beds and laughing children. For has he not fine fences?
And those over yonder, why should they build fences on the rack-
rented land? It will only increase their rent.
On we wind, through sand and pines and glimpses of old
plantations, till there creeps into sight a cluster of buildings,—wood
and brick, mills and houses, and scattered cabins. It seemed quite a
village. As it came 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 imagine the place under some weird
spell, and was half-minded to search out the princess. An old ragged
black man, honest, simple, and improvident, told us the tale. The
Wizard of the North—the Capitalist—had rushed down in the
seventies to woo this coy dark soil. He bought a square mile or more,
and for a time the field-hands sang, the gins groaned, and the mills
buzzed. Then came a change. The agent’s son embezzled the funds
and ran off with them. Then the agent himself disappeared. Finally
the new agent stole 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. So the Waters-Loring plantation
was stilled by the spell of dishonesty, and stands like some gaunt
rebuke to a scarred land.
Somehow that plantation ended our day’s journey; for I could not
shake off the influence of that silent scene. Back toward town we
glided, past the straight and thread-like pines, past a dark tree-dotted
pond where the air was heavy with a dead sweet perfume. White
slender-legged curlews flitted by us, and the garnet blooms of the
cotton looked gay against the green and purple stalks. A peasant girl
was hoeing in the field, white-turbaned and black-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 a
tragic 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 the Egypt of the Confederacy. It is full of historic
interest. First there is the Swamp, to the west, where the
Chickasawhatchee flows sullenly southward. The shadow of an old
plantation lies at its edge, forlorn and dark. Then comes the pool;
pendent gray moss and brackish waters appear, and forests filled with
wildfowl. In one place the wood is on fire, smouldering in dull red
anger; but nobody minds. Then the swamp grows beautiful; a raised
road, built by chained Negro convicts, dips down into it, and forms a
way walled and almost covered in living green. Spreading trees
spring from a prodigal luxuriance of undergrowth; great dark green
shadows fade into the black background, until all is one mass of
tangled semi-tropical foliage, marvellous in its weird savage
splendor. Once we crossed a black silent stream, where the sad trees
and writhing creepers, all glinting fiery yellow and green, seemed
like some vast cathedral,—some green Milan builded of wildwood.
And as I crossed, I seemed to see again that fierce tragedy of seventy

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years ago. Osceola, the Indian-Negro chieftain, had risen in the

swamps of Florida, vowing vengeance. His war-cry reached the red
Creeks of Dougherty, and their war-cry rang from the Chattahoochee
to the sea. Men and women and children fled and fell before them as
they swept into Dougherty. In yonder shadows a dark and hideously
painted warrior glided stealthily on,—another and another, until three
hundred had crept into the treacherous swamp. Then the false slime
closing about them called the white men from the east. Waist-deep,
they fought beneath the tall trees, until the war-cry was hushed and
the Indians glided back into the west. Small wonder the wood is red.
Then came the black slaves. Day after day the clank of chained
feet marching from Virginia and Carolina to Georgia was heard in
these rich swamp lands. Day after day the songs of the callous, the
wail of the motherless, and the muttered curses of the wretched
echoed from the Flint to the Chickasawhatchee, until by 1860 there
had risen in West Dougherty perhaps the richest slave kingdom the
modern world ever knew. A hundred and fifty barons commanded the
labor of nearly six thousand Negroes, held sway over farms with
ninety thousand acres tilled land, valued even in times of cheap soil
at three millions of dollars. Twenty thousand bales of ginned cotton
went yearly to England, New and Old; and men that came there
bankrupt made money and grew rich. In a single decade the cotton
output increased four-fold and the value of lands was tripled. It was
the heyday of the nouveau riche, and a life of careless extravagance
among the masters. Four and six bobtailed thoroughbreds rolled their
coaches to town; open hospitality and gay entertainment were the
rule. Parks and groves were laid out, rich with flower and vine, and
in the midst stood the low wide-halled “big house,” with its porch
and columns and great fireplaces.
And yet with all this there was something sordid, something
forced,—a certain feverish unrest and recklessness; for was not all
this show and tinsel built upon a groan? “This land was a little Hell,”
said a ragged, brown, and grave-faced man to me. We were seated
near a roadside blacksmith shop, and behind was the bare ruin of
some master’s home. “I’ve seen niggers drop dead in the furrow, but
they were kicked aside, and the plough never stopped. Down in the
guard-house, there’s where the blood ran.”
With such foundations a kingdom must in time sway and fall. The
masters moved to Macon and Augusta, and left only 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 where
once was a castle entrance; an old rusty anvil lying amid rotting
bellows and wood in the ruins of a blacksmith shop; a wide rambling
old mansion, brown and dingy, filled now with the grandchildren of
the slaves who once waited on its tables; while the family of the
master has dwindled to two lone women, who live in Macon and
feed hungrily off the remnants of an earldom. So we ride on, past
phantom gates and falling homes,—past the once flourishing farms
of the Smiths, the Gandys, and the Lagores,—and find all dilapidated
and half ruined, even there where a solitary white woman, a relic of
other days, sits alone in state among miles of Negroes and rides to
town in her ancient coach each day.

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This was indeed the Egypt of the Confederacy,—the rich granary

whence potatoes and corn and cotton poured out to the famished and
ragged Confederate troops as they battled for a cause lost long before
1861. Sheltered and secure, it became the place of refuge for
families, wealth, and slaves. Yet even then the hard ruthless rape of
the land began to tell. The red-clay sub-soil already had begun to
peer above the loam. The harder the slaves were driven the more
careless and fatal was their farming. Then came the revolution of war
and Emancipation, the bewilderment of Reconstruction,—and now,
what is the Egypt of the Confederacy, and what meaning has it for
the nation’s weal or woe?
It is a land of rapid contrasts and of curiously mingled hope and
pain. Here sits a pretty blue-eyed quadroon hiding her bare feet; she
was 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 is Gatesby, brown and tall, lord of two thousand
acres shrewdly won and held. There is a store conducted by his black
son, a blacksmith shop, and a ginnery. Five miles below here is a
town owned and controlled by one white New Englander. He owns
almost a Rhode Island county, with thousands of acres and hundreds
of black laborers. Their cabins look better than most, and the farm,
with machinery and fertilizers, is much more business-like than any
in the county, although the manager drives hard bargains in wages.
When now we turn and look five miles above, there on the edge of
town are five houses of prostitutes,—two of blacks and three of
whites; and in one of the houses of the whites a worthless black boy
was harbored too openly two years ago; so he was hanged for rape.
And here, too, is the high whitewashed fence of the “stockade,” as
the county prison is called; the white folks say it is ever full of black
criminals,—the black folks say that only colored boys are sent to jail,
and they not because they are guilty, but because the State needs
criminals to eke out its income by their forced labor.
The Jew is the heir of the slave baron in Dougherty; and as we ride
westward, by wide stretching cornfields and stubby orchards of
peach and pear, we see on all sides within the circle of dark forest a
Land of Canaan. Here and there are tales of projects for money-
getting, born in the swift days of Reconstruction,—“improvement”
companies, wine companies, mills and factories; most failed, and the
Jew 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 and palmettos. But a pall of debt hangs over the beautiful land;
the merchants are in debt to the wholesalers, the planters are in debt
to the merchants, the tenants owe the planters, and laborers bow and
bend beneath the burden of it all. Here and there a man has raised his
head above these murky waters. We passed one fenced stock-farm
with grass and grazing cattle, that looked very home-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 credit to New England. His master helped him to get a start, but
when the black man died last fall the master’s sons immediately laid

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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 comfortable feeling that
the Negro is rising. Even then, however, the fields, as we proceed,
begin to redden and the trees disappear. Rows of old cabins appear
filled with renters and laborers,—cheerless, bare, and dirty, for the
most part, although here and there the very age and decay makes the
scene picturesque. A young black fellow greets us. He is twenty-two,
and just married. Until last year he had good luck renting; then
cotton fell, and the sheriff 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 for twenty 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 war it was
for many years worked by gangs of Negro convicts,—and black
convicts then 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 and mistreatment of the chained freemen are
told, but the county authorities were deaf until the free-labor market
was nearly ruined by wholesale migration. Then they took the
convicts from the plantations, but not until one of the fairest regions
of the “Oakey Woods” had been ruined and ravished into a red waste,
out of which only a Yankee or an immigrant could squeeze more
blood from debt-cursed tenants.
No wonder that Luke Black, slow, dull, and discouraged, shuffles
to our carriage and talks hopelessly. Why should he strive? Every
year finds him deeper in debt. How strange that Georgia, the world-
heralded refuge of poor debtors, should bind her own to sloth and
misfortune as ruthlessly as ever England did! The poor land groans
with its birth-pains, and brings forth scarcely a hundred pounds of
cotton to the acre, where fifty years ago it yielded eight times as
much. Of his meagre yield the tenant pays from a quarter to a third in
rent, and most of the rest in interest on food and supplies bought on
credit. Twenty years yonder sunken-cheeked, old black man has
labored under that system, and now, turned day-laborer, is supporting
his wife and boarding himself on his wages of a dollar and a half a
week, received only part of the year.
The Bolton convict farm formerly included the neighboring
plantation. Here it was that the convicts were lodged in the great log
prison still standing. A dismal place it still remains, with rows of
ugly huts filled with surly ignorant tenants. “What rent do you pay
here?” I inquired. “I don’t know,—what is it, Sam?” “All we make,”
answered Sam. It is a depressing place,—bare, unshaded, with no
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 throughout this region. There is little of the joyous
abandon and playfulness which we are wont to associate with the
plantation Negro. At best, the natural good-nature is edged with
complaint or has changed into sullenness and gloom. And now and
then it blazes forth in veiled but hot anger. I remember one big red-
eyed black whom we met by the roadside. Forty-five years he had
labored on this farm, beginning with nothing, and still having
nothing. To be sure, he had given four children a common-school

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training, and perhaps if the new fence-law had not allowed unfenced
crops in West Dougherty he might have raised a little stock and kept
ahead. As it is, he is hopelessly in debt, disappointed, and embittered.
He stopped us to inquire after the black boy in Albany, whom it was
said a policeman had shot and killed for loud talking on the sidewalk.
And then he said slowly: “Let a white man touch me, and he dies; I
don’t boast this,—I don’t say it around loud, or before the children,
—but I mean it. I’ve seen them whip my father and my old mother in
them cotton-rows till the blood ran; by—” and we passed on.
Now Sears, whom we met next lolling under the chubby oak-trees,
was of quite different fibre. Happy?—Well, yes; he laughed and
flipped pebbles, and thought the world was as it was. He had worked
here twelve years and has nothing but a mortgaged mule. Children?
Yes, seven; but they hadn’t been to school this year,—couldn’t afford
books and clothes, and couldn’t spare their work. There go part of
them to the fields now,—three big boys astride mules, and a
strapping girl with bare brown legs. Careless ignorance and laziness
here, fierce hate and vindictiveness there;—these are the extremes of
the Negro problem which we met that day, and we scarce knew
which we preferred.
Here and there we meet distinct characters quite out of the
ordinary. One came out of a piece of newly cleared ground, making a
wide detour to avoid the snakes. He was an old, hollow-cheeked
man, with a drawn and characterful brown face. He had a sort of self-
contained quaintness and rough humor 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 it up 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
then bowed almost to the ground, with an imperturbable gravity that
seemed almost suspicious. Then he continued, “My mule died last
week,”—a calamity in this land equal to a devastating fire in town,
—“but a white man loaned me another.” Then he added, eyeing us,
“Oh, I gets along with white folks.” We turned the conversation.
“Bears? deer?” he answered, “well, I should say there were,” and he
let fly a string of brave oaths, as he told hunting-tales of the swamp.
We left him standing still in the middle of the road looking after us,
and yet apparently not noticing us.
The Whistle place, which includes his bit of land, was bought soon
after the war by an English syndicate, the “Dixie Cotton and Corn
Company.” A marvellous deal of style their factor put on, with his
servants and coach-and-six; so much so that the concern soon landed
in inextricable bankruptcy. Nobody lives in the old house now, but a
man comes each winter out of the North and collects his high rents. I
know not which are the 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 terrible thing; they that rose rich
in the morning often slept in paupers’ beds. Beggars and vulgar
speculators rose to rule over them, and their children went astray. See
yonder sad-colored house, with its cabins and fences and glad crops!
It is not glad within; last month the prodigal son of the struggling

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father 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, and shot himself dead. And the world passed on.
I remember wheeling around a bend in the road beside a graceful
bit of forest and a singing brook. A long low house faced us, with
porch and flying pillars, great oaken door, and a broad lawn shining
in the evening sun. But the window-panes were gone, the pillars
were worm-eaten, and the moss-grown roof was falling in. Half
curiously I peered through the unhinged door, and saw where, on the
wall across the hall, was written in once gay letters a faded
“Welcome.”
Quite a contrast to the southwestern part of Dougherty County is
the northwest. Soberly timbered in oak and pine, it has none of that
half-tropical luxuriance of the southwest. Then, too, there are fewer
signs of a 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 to some extent the absentee
landlord and rack-rented tenant. The crops have neither the
luxuriance of the richer land nor the signs of neglect so often seen,
and there were fences and meadows here and there. Most of this land
was poor, and beneath the notice of the slave-baron, before the war.
Since then his poor relations and foreign immigrants have seized it.
The returns of the farmer are too small to allow much for wages, and
yet he will not sell off small farms. There is the Negro Sanford; he
has worked fourteen years as overseer on the Ladson place, and
“paid out enough for fertilizers to have bought a farm,” but the
owner will not sell off a few acres.
Two children—a boy and a girl—are hoeing sturdily in 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 the
Cotton Seed Oil Trust has forced the price of ginning so low that he
says it hardly 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 the tall and powerful black Moses who led the Negroes for a
generation, and led them well. He was a Baptist preacher, and when
he died, two thousand black people followed him to the grave; and
now they preach his funeral sermon each year. His widow lives here,
—a weazened, sharp-featured little woman, who curtsied quaintly as
we greeted her. Further on lives Jack Delson, the most prosperous
Negro farmer in the county. It is a joy to meet him,—a great broad-
shouldered, handsome black man, intelligent and jovial. Six hundred
and fifty acres he owns, and has eleven black tenants. A neat and tidy
home nestled in a flower-garden, and a little store stands beside it.
We pass the Munson place, where a plucky white widow is renting
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 the cabins are bare board-houses scattered
here and there. The rents are high, and day-laborers and “contract”
hands abound. It is a keen, hard struggle for living here, and few
have time to talk. Tired with the long ride, we gladly drive into
Gillonsville. It is a silent cluster of farmhouses standing on the
crossroads, with one of its stores closed and the other kept by a
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Negro preacher. They tell great tales of busy times at Gillonsville

before all the railroads 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 of those scenes one cannot soon forget:—
a wide, low, little house, whose motherly roof reached over and
sheltered a snug little porch. There we sat, after the long hot drive,
drinking cool water,—the talkative little storekeeper who is my daily
companion; the silent old black woman patching pantaloons and
saying never a word; the ragged picture of helpless misfortune who
called in just to see the preacher; and finally the neat matronly
preacher’s wife, plump, yellow, and intelligent. “Own land?” said the
wife; “well, only this house.” Then she added quietly. “We did buy
seven hundred acres across up yonder, and paid for it; but they
cheated us out of it. Sells was the owner.” “Sells!” echoed the ragged
misfortune, who was leaning against the balustrade and listening,
“he’s a regular cheat. I worked for him thirty-seven days this spring,
and he paid me in cardboard checks which were to be cashed at the
end of the month. But he never cashed them,—kept putting me off.
Then the sheriff came and took my mule and corn and furniture—”
“Furniture? But furniture is exempt from seizure by law.” “Well, he
took it just the same,” said the hard-faced man.

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VIII.
Of the Quest of the Golden Fleece
But the Brute said in his breast, “Till the mills I grind have ceased,
The riches shall be dust of dust, 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 edged with
dark green, its bold white signals waving like the foam of billows
from Carolina to Texas across that Black and human Sea? I have
sometimes half suspected that here the winged ram Chrysomallus left
that Fleece after which Jason and his Argonauts went vaguely
wandering into the shadowy East three thousand years ago; and
certainly one 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 the Golden 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 and
most significant thing in the New South to-day. All through the
Carolinas and Georgia, 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 slow and sleepy land. Perhaps they
sprang from dragons’ teeth. So the Cotton Kingdom still lives; the
world still bows beneath her sceptre. Even the markets that once
defied the parvenu have crept one by one across the seas, and then
slowly and reluctantly, but surely, have started toward the Black Belt.
To be sure, there are those who wag their heads knowingly and tell
us that the capital of the Cotton Kingdom has moved from the Black
to the White Belt,—that the Negro of to-day raises not more than
half of the cotton crop. Such men forget that the cotton crop has
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doubled, and more than doubled, 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 the Confederacy builded its
hopes. So the Negro forms to-day one of the chief figures in a great
world-industry; and this, for its own sake, and in the light of historic
interest, makes the field-hands of the cotton country worth studying.
We seldom study the condition of the Negro to-day honestly and
carefully. It is so much easier to assume that we know it all. Or
perhaps, having already reached conclusions in our own minds, we
are loth to have them disturbed by facts. And yet how little we really
know of these millions,—of their daily lives and longings, of their
homely joys and sorrows, of their real shortcomings and the meaning
of their crimes! All this we can only learn by intimate contact with
the masses, and not by wholesale arguments covering millions
separate in time and space, and differing widely in training and
culture. To-day, then, my reader, let us turn our faces to the Black
Belt of Georgia and seek simply to know the condition of the black
farm-laborers of one county there.
Here in 1890 lived ten thousand Negroes and two thousand whites.
The country is rich, yet the people are poor. The keynote of the Black
Belt is debt; not commercial credit, but debt in the sense of continued
inability on the part of the mass of the population to make income
cover expense. This is the direct heritage of the South from the
wasteful economies of the slave régime; but it was emphasized and
brought to a crisis by the Emancipation of the slaves. In 1860,
Dougherty County had six thousand slaves, worth at least two and a
half millions of dollars; its farms were estimated at three millions,—
making five and a half millions of property, the value of which
depended largely on the slave system, and on the speculative demand
for land once marvellously rich but already partially devitalized by
careless and exhaustive culture. The war then meant a financial
crash; in place of the five and a half millions of 1860, there remained
in 1870 only farms valued at less than two millions. With this came
increased competition in cotton culture from the rich lands of Texas;
a steady fall in the normal price of cotton followed, from about
fourteen cents a pound in 1860 until it reached four cents in 1898.
Such a financial revolution was it that involved the owners of the
cotton-belt in debt. And if things went ill with the master, how fared
it with the man?
The plantations of Dougherty County in slavery days were not as
imposing and aristocratic as those of Virginia. The Big House was
smaller and usually one-storied, and sat very near the slave cabins.
Sometimes these cabins stretched off on either side like wings;
sometimes only on one side, forming a double row, or edging the
road that turned into the plantation from the main thoroughfare. The
form and disposition of the laborers’ cabins throughout the Black
Belt is to-day the same as in slavery days. Some live in the self-same
cabins, others in cabins rebuilt on the sites of the old. All are
sprinkled in little groups over the face of the land, centering about
some dilapidated Big House where the head-tenant or agent lives.
The general character and arrangement of these dwellings remains on
the whole unaltered. There were in the county, outside the corporate
town of Albany, about fifteen hundred Negro families in 1898. Out of

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all these, only a single family occupied a house with seven rooms;
only fourteen have five rooms or more. The mass live in one- and
two-room homes.
The size and arrangements of a people’s homes are no unfair index
of their condition. If, then, we inquire more carefully into these
Negro homes, we find much that is unsatisfactory. All over the face
of the land is the one-room cabin,—now standing in the shadow of
the Big House, now staring at the dusty road, now rising dark and
sombre amid the green of the cotton-fields. It is nearly always old
and bare, built of rough boards, and neither plastered nor ceiled.
Light and ventilation are supplied by the single door and by the
square hole in the wall with its wooden shutter. There is no glass,
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 few chairs compose the furniture; while a stray
show-bill or a newspaper makes up the decorations for the walls.
Now and then one may find such a cabin kept scrupulously neat, with
merry steaming fireplaces and hospitable door; but the majority are
dirty and dilapidated, smelling of eating and sleeping, poorly
ventilated, and anything but homes.
Above all, the cabins are crowded. We have come to associate
crowding with homes in cities almost exclusively. This is primarily
because we have so little accurate knowledge of country life. Here in
Dougherty County one may find families of eight and ten occupying
one or two rooms, and for every ten rooms of house accommodation
for the Negroes there are twenty-five persons. The worst tenement
abominations of New York do not have above twenty-two persons
for every ten rooms. Of course, one small, close room in a city,
without a yard, is in many respects worse than the larger single
country room. In other respects it is better; it has glass windows, a
decent chimney, and a trustworthy floor. The single great advantage
of the Negro peasant is that he may spend most of his life outside his
hovel, in the open fields.
There are four chief causes of these wretched homes: First, long
custom born of slavery has assigned such homes to Negroes; white
laborers would be offered better accommodations, and might, for that
and similar reasons, give better work. Secondly, the Negroes, used to
such accommodations, do not as a rule demand better; they do not
know what better houses mean. Thirdly, the landlords as a class have
not yet come to realize that it is a good business investment to raise
the standard of living among labor by slow and judicious methods;
that a Negro laborer who demands three rooms and fifty cents a day
would give more efficient work and leave a larger profit than a
discouraged toiler herding his family in one room and working for
thirty cents. Lastly, among such conditions of life there are few
incentives to make the laborer become a better farmer. If he is
ambitious, he moves to town or tries other labor; as a tenant-farmer
his outlook is almost hopeless, and following it as a makeshift, he
takes the house that is given him without protest.
In such homes, then, these Negro peasants live. The families are
both small and large; there are many single tenants,—widows and
bachelors, and remnants of broken groups. The system of labor and
the size of the houses both tend to the breaking up of family groups:
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the grown children go away as contract hands or migrate to town, the

sister goes into service; and so one 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 and over half the brides are under twenty; the same was
true of the antebellum Negroes. Today, however, very few of the
boys and less than a fifth of the Negro girls under twenty are married.
The young men marry between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-
five; the young women between twenty and thirty. Such
postponement is due to the difficulty of earning sufficient to rear and
support a family; and it undoubtedly leads, in the country districts, to
sexual immorality. The form of this immorality, however, is very
seldom that of prostitution, and less frequently that of illegitimacy
than one would imagine. Rather, it takes the form of separation and
desertion after a family group has been 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 with
divorce statistics, for many of these separated women are in reality
widowed, were the truth known, and in other cases the separation is
not permanent. Nevertheless, here lies the seat of greatest moral
danger. There is little or no prostitution among these Negroes, and
over three-fourths of the families, as found by house-to-house
investigation, deserve to be classed as decent people with
considerable regard for female chastity. To be sure, the ideas of the
mass would not suit New England, and there are many loose habits
and notions. Yet the rate of illegitimacy is undoubtedly lower than in
Austria or Italy, and the women as a class are modest. The plague-
spot in sexual relations is easy marriage and easy separation. This is
no sudden development, nor the fruit of Emancipation. It is the plain
heritage from slavery. In those days Sam, with his master’s consent,
“took up” with Mary. No ceremony was necessary, and in the busy
life of the great plantations of the Black Belt it was usually dispensed
with. If now the master needed Sam’s work in another plantation or
in another part of the same plantation, or if he took a notion to sell
the slave, Sam’s married life with Mary was usually
unceremoniously broken, and then it was clearly to the master’s
interest to have both of them take new mates. This widespread
custom of two centuries has not been eradicated in thirty years. To-
day Sam’s grandson “takes up” with a woman without license or
ceremony; they live together decently and honestly, and are, to all
intents and purposes, man and wife. Sometimes these unions are
never broken until death; but in too many cases family quarrels, a
roving spirit, a rival suitor, or perhaps more frequently the hopeless
battle to support a family, lead to separation, and a broken household
is the result. The Negro church has done much to stop this practice,
and now most marriage ceremonies are performed by the pastors.
Nevertheless, the evil is still deep seated, and only a general raising
of the standard of living will finally cure it.
Looking now at the county black population as a whole, it is fair
to characterize it as poor and ignorant. Perhaps ten per cent compose
the well-to-do and the best of the laborers, while at least nine per
cent are thoroughly lewd and vicious. The rest, over eighty per cent,
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are poor and ignorant, fairly honest and well meaning, plodding, and
to a degree shiftless, with some but not great sexual looseness. Such
class lines are by no means fixed; they vary, one might almost say,
with the price of cotton. The degree of ignorance cannot easily be
expressed. We may say, for instance, that nearly two-thirds of them
cannot read or write. This but partially expresses the fact. They are
ignorant of the world about them, of modern economic organization,
of the function of government, of individual worth and possibilities,
—of nearly all those things which slavery in self-defence had to keep
them from learning. Much that the white boy imbibes from his
earliest social atmosphere forms the puzzling problems of the black
boy’s mature years. America is not another word for Opportunity to
all her sons.
It is easy for us to lose ourselves in details in endeavoring to grasp
and comprehend the real condition of a mass of human beings. 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 ways and thought; and yet it loves and hates, it toils and tires, it
laughs and weeps its bitter tears, and looks in vague and awful
longing at the grim horizon of its life,—all this, even as you and I.
These black thousands are not in reality lazy; they are improvident
and careless; they insist on breaking the monotony of toil with a
glimpse at the great town-world on Saturday; they have their loafers
and their rascals; but the great mass of them work continuously and
faithfully for a return, and under circumstances that would call 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 their schooling after the “crops are laid by,” and very few there
are that stay in school after the spring work has begun. Child-labor is
to be found here in some of its worst phases, as fostering ignorance
and stunting physical development. 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 four teachers.
This narrowness of life reaches its maximum among the women:
thirteen hundred and fifty of these are farm laborers, one hundred are
servants and washerwomen, leaving sixty-five housewives, eight
teachers, and six seamstresses.
Among this people there is no leisure class. We often forget that in
the United States over half the youth and adults are not in the world
earning incomes, but are making homes, learning of the world, or
resting after the heat of the strife. But here ninety-six per cent are
toiling; no one with leisure to turn the bare and cheerless cabin into a
home, no old folks to sit beside the fire and hand down traditions of
the past; little of careless happy childhood and dreaming youth. The
dull monotony of daily toil is broken only 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 few tools to
relieve its burdensome drudgery. But with all this, it is work in the
pure open air, and this is something in a day when fresh air is scarce.
The land on the whole is still fertile, despite long abuse. For nine
or ten months in succession the crops will come if asked: garden

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vegetables in April, grain in May, melons in June and July, hay in

August, sweet potatoes in September, and cotton from then to
Christmas. And yet on two-thirds of the land there is but one crop,
and that leaves the toilers in debt. Why is this?
Away down the Baysan road, where the broad flat fields are
flanked by great oak forests, is a plantation; many thousands of acres
it used to run, here and there, and beyond the great wood. Thirteen
hundred human beings 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 seamed and drawn, and his tightly
curled hair gray-white. The crops? Just tolerable, he said; just
tolerable. Getting on? No—he wasn’t getting on at all. Smith of
Albany “furnishes” him, and his rent is eight hundred pounds of
cotton. Can’t make anything at that. Why didn’t he buy land!
Humph! Takes money to buy land. And he turns away. Free! The
most piteous thing amid all the black ruin of war-time, amid the
broken fortunes of the masters, the blighted hopes of mothers and
maidens, and the fall of an empire,—the most piteous thing amid all
this was the black freedman who threw down his hoe because the
world called him free. What did such a mockery of freedom mean?
Not a cent of money, not an inch of land, not a mouthful of victuals,
—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 bacon and meal to his Negroes. And after the first flush of
freedom wore off, and his true 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 service was theoretically far
different; in practice, task-work or “cropping” was substituted for
daily toil in gangs; and the slave gradually became a metayer, or
tenant on shares, in name, but a laborer with indeterminate wages in
fact.
Still the price of cotton fell, and gradually the landlords deserted
their plantations, and the reign of the merchant began. The merchant
of the Black Belt is a curious institution,—part banker, part landlord,
part banker, and part despot. His store, which used most frequently to
stand at the cross-roads and become the centre of a weekly village,
has now moved to town; and thither the Negro tenant follows him.
The merchant keeps everything,—clothes and shoes, coffee and
sugar, pork and meal, canned and dried goods, wagons and ploughs,
seed and fertilizer,—and what he has not in stock 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 absent landlord’s agent
for hiring forty acres of land; he fingers his hat nervously until the
merchant finishes his morning chat with Colonel Saunders, and calls
out, “Well, Sam, what do you want?” Sam wants him to “furnish”
him,—i.e., to advance him food and clothing for the year, and
perhaps seed and tools, until his crop is raised and sold. If Sam
seems a favorable subject, he and the merchant go to a lawyer, and
Sam executes a chattel mortgage on his mule and wagon in return for
seed and a week’s rations. As soon as the green cotton-leaves appear
above the ground, another mortgage is given on the “crop.” Every
Saturday, or at longer intervals, Sam calls upon the merchant for his
“rations”; a family of five usually gets about thirty pounds of fat
side-pork and a couple of bushels of cornmeal a month. Besides this,
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clothing and shoes must be furnished; if Sam or his family is sick,

there are orders on the druggist and doctor; if the mule wants
shoeing, an order on the blacksmith, etc. If Sam is a 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
Dougherty County sold a thousand buggies in one season, mostly to
black men.
The security offered for such transactions—a crop and chattel
mortgage—may at first seem slight. And, indeed, the merchants tell
many a true tale of shiftlessness and cheating; of cotton picked at
night, mules disappearing, and tenants absconding. But on the whole
the merchant of the Black Belt is the most prosperous man in the
section. So skilfully and so closely has he drawn the bonds of the law
about the tenant, that the black man has often simply to choose
between pauperism and crime; he “waives” all homestead
exemptions in his contract; he cannot touch his own mortgaged crop,
which the laws put almost in the full control of the land-owner and of
the merchant. When the crop is growing the merchant watches it like
a hawk; as soon as it is ready for market he takes possession of it,
sells it, pays the landowner his rent, subtracts his bill for supplies,
and if, as sometimes happens, there is anything left, he hands it over
to the black serf for his Christmas celebration.
The direct result of this system is an all-cotton scheme of
agriculture and the continued bankruptcy of the tenant. The currency
of the Black Belt is cotton. It is a crop always salable for ready
money, not usually subject to great yearly fluctuations in price, and
one which the Negroes know how to raise. The landlord therefore
demands his rent in cotton, and the merchant will accept mortgages
on no other crop. There is no use asking the black tenant, then, to
diversify his crops,—he cannot under this system. Moreover, the
system is bound to bankrupt the tenant. I remember once meeting a
little one-mule wagon on the River road. A young black fellow sat in
it driving listlessly, his elbows on his knees. His dark-faced wife sat
beside him, stolid, silent.
“Hello!” cried my driver,—he has a most imprudent way of
addressing these people, though they seem used to it,—“what have
you got there?”
“Meat and meal,” answered the man, stopping. The meat lay
uncovered in the bottom of the wagon,—a great thin side of fat pork
covered 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 bought for six or seven
cents cash.
“And the meal?”
“Two dollars.” One dollar and ten cents is the cash price in town.
Here was a man paying five dollars for goods which he could have
bought for three dollars cash, and raised for one dollar or one dollar
and a half.
Yet it is not wholly his fault. The Negro farmer started behind,—
started in debt. This was not his choosing, but the crime of this
happy-go-lucky nation which goes blundering along with its
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Reconstruction tragedies, its Spanish war interludes and Philippine

matinees, just as though God really were dead. Once in debt, it is no
easy matter for a whole race to emerge.
In the year of low-priced cotton, 1898, out of three hundred tenant
families one hundred and seventy-five ended their year’s work in
debt to the extent of fourteen thousand dollars; fifty cleared nothing,
and the remaining seventy-five made a total profit of sixteen hundred
dollars. The net indebtedness of the black tenant families of the
whole county must have been at least sixty thousand dollars. In a
more prosperous year the situation is far better; but on the average
the majority of tenants end the year even, or in debt, which means
that they work for board and clothes. Such an economic organization
is radically wrong. Whose is the blame?
The underlying causes of this situation are complicated but
discernible. And one of the chief, outside the carelessness of the
nation in letting the slave start with nothing, is the widespread
opinion among the merchants and employers of the Black Belt that
only by the slavery of debt can the Negro be kept at work. Without
doubt, some pressure was necessary at the beginning of the free-
labor system to keep the listless and lazy at work; and even to-day
the mass of the Negro laborers need stricter guardianship than most
Northern laborers. Behind this honest and widespread opinion
dishonesty and cheating of the ignorant laborers have a good chance
to take refuge. And to all this must be added the obvious fact that a
slave ancestry and a system of unrequited toil has not improved the
efficiency or temper of the mass of black laborers. Nor is this
peculiar to Sambo; it has in history been just as true of John and
Hans, of Jacques and Pat, of all ground-down peasantries. Such is the
situation of the mass of the Negroes in the Black Belt to-day; and
they are thinking about it. Crime, and a cheap and dangerous
socialism, are the inevitable results of this pondering. I see now that
ragged black man sitting on a log, aimlessly whittling a stick. He
muttered to me with the murmur of many ages, when he said: “White
man sit down whole year; Nigger work day and 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 of Negroes 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 no easy
thing for the serf to escape into the freedom of town-life, even so to-
day there are hindrances laid in the way of county laborers. In
considerable parts of all the Gulf States, and especially in
Mississippi, Louisiana, and Arkansas, the Negroes on the plantations
in the back-country districts are still held at forced labor practically
without wages. Especially is this true in districts where the farmers
are composed of the more ignorant class of poor whites, and the
Negroes are beyond the reach of schools and intercourse with their
advancing fellows. If such a peon should run away, the sheriff,
elected by white 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 petty thieving, easily true, can be depended upon
to secure his return. Even if some unduly officious person insist upon
a trial, neighborly comity will probably make his conviction sure,
and then the labor due the county can easily be bought by the master.
Such a system is impossible in the more civilized parts of the South,
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or near the large towns and cities; but in those vast stretches of land
beyond the telegraph and the newspaper the spirit of the Thirteenth
Amendment is sadly broken. This represents the lowest economic
depths of the black American peasant; and in a study of the rise and
condition of the Negro freeholder we must trace his economic
progress from the modern serfdom.
Even in the better-ordered country districts of the South the free
movement of agricultural laborers is hindered by the migration-agent
laws. The “Associated Press” recently informed the world of the
arrest of a young white man in Southern Georgia who represented
the “Atlantic Naval Supplies Company,” and who “was caught in the
act of enticing hands from the turpentine farm of Mr. John Greer.”
The crime for which this young man was arrested is taxed five
hundred dollars for each county in which the employment agent
proposes to gather laborers for work outside the State. Thus the
Negroes’ ignorance of the labor-market outside his own vicinity is
increased rather than diminished by the laws of nearly every
Southern State.
Similar to such measures is the unwritten law of the back districts
and small towns of the South, that the character of all Negroes
unknown 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 whose protection the new-made freedman was put. In
many instances this system has been of great good to the Negro, and
very often under the protection and guidance of the former master’s
family, or other white friends, the freedman progressed in wealth and
morality. But the same system has in other cases resulted in the
refusal of whole communities to recognize the right of a Negro to
change his habitation and to be master of his own fortunes. A black
stranger in Baker County, Georgia, for instance, is liable to be
stopped anywhere on the public highway and made to state his
business to the satisfaction of any white interrogator. If he fails to
give a suitable answer, or seems too independent or “sassy,” he may
be arrested or summarily driven away.
Thus it is that in the country districts of the South, by written or
unwritten law, peonage, hindrances to the migration of labor, and a
system of white patronage exists over large areas. Besides this, the
chance for lawless oppression and illegal exactions is vastly greater
in the country than in the city, and nearly all the more serious race
disturbances of the last decade have arisen from disputes in the
county between master and man,—as, for instance, the Sam Hose
affair. As a result of such a situation, there arose, first, the Black Belt;
and, second, the Migration to Town. The Black Belt was not, as
many assumed, a movement toward fields of labor under more genial
climatic conditions; it was primarily a huddling for self-protection,—
a massing of the black population for mutual defence in order to
secure the peace and tranquillity necessary to economic advance.
This movement took place between Emancipation and 1880, and
only partially accomplished the desired results. The rush to town
since 1880 is the counter-movement of men disappointed in the
economic opportunities of the Black Belt.
In Dougherty County, Georgia, one can see easily the results of
this experiment in huddling for protection. Only ten per cent of the
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adult population was born in the county, and yet the blacks
outnumber the whites four or five to one. There is undoubtedly a
security to the blacks in their very numbers,—a personal freedom
from arbitrary treatment, which makes hundreds of laborers cling to
Dougherty in spite of low wages and economic distress. But a change
is coming, and slowly but surely even here the agricultural 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 black
landed peasantry, which has for a generation and more been the
dream of philanthropist and statesman?
To the car-window sociologist, to the man who seeks to
understand and know the South by devoting the few leisure hours of
a holiday trip to unravelling the snarl of centuries,—to such men
very often the whole trouble with the black field-hand may be
summed up by Aunt Ophelia’s word, “Shiftless!” They have noted
repeatedly scenes like one I saw last summer. We were riding along
the highroad to town at the close of a long hot day. A couple of
young black fellows passed us in a muleteam, with several bushels of
loose corn in the ear. One was driving, listlessly bent forward, his
elbows 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 noticed an ear of corn fall from the wagon.
They never saw it,—not they. A rod farther on we noted another ear
on the ground; and between that creeping mule and town we counted
twenty-six ears of corn. Shiftless? Yes, the personification 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, but rather a fine disdain for mere cash. They’ll
loaf before your face and work behind your back with good-natured
honesty. They’ll steal a watermelon, and hand you back your lost
purse intact. Their great defect as laborers lies in their lack of
incentive beyond the mere pleasure of physical exertion. They are
careless because they have not found that it pays to be careful; they
are improvident because the improvident ones of their acquaintance
get on about as well as the provident. Above all, they cannot see why
they should take unusual pains to make the white man’s land better,
or to fatten his mule, or save his corn. On the other hand, the white
land-owner argues that any attempt to improve these laborers by
increased responsibility, or higher wages, or better homes, or land of
their own, would be sure to result in failure. He shows his Northern
visitor the scarred and wretched land; the ruined mansions, the worn-
out soil and mortgaged acres, and says, This is Negro freedom!
Now it happens that both master and man have just enough
argument on their respective sides to make it difficult for them to
understand each other. The Negro dimly personifies in the white man
all his ills and misfortunes; if he is poor, it is because the white man
seizes the fruit of his toil; if he is ignorant, it is because the white
man gives him neither time nor facilities to learn; and, indeed, if any
misfortune happens to him, it is because of some hidden
machinations of “white folks.” On the other hand, the masters and
the masters’ sons have never been able to see why the Negro, instead
of settling down to be day-laborers for bread and clothes, are infected
with a silly desire to rise in the world, and why they are sulky,
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dissatisfied, and careless, where their fathers were happy and dumb
and faithful. “Why, you niggers have an easier time than I do,” said a
puzzled Albany merchant to his black customer. “Yes,” he replied,
“and so does yo’ hogs.”
Taking, then, the dissatisfied and shiftless field-hand as a starting-
point, let us inquire how the black thousands of Dougherty have
struggled from him up toward their ideal, and what that ideal is. All
social struggle is evidenced by the rise, first of economic, then of
social classes, among a homogeneous population. To-day the
following economic classes are plainly differentiated among these
Negroes.
A “submerged tenth” of croppers, with a few paupers; forty per
cent who are metayers and thirty-nine per cent of semi-metayers and
wage-laborers. There are left five per cent of money-renters and six
per cent of freeholders,—the “Upper Ten” of the land. The croppers
are entirely without capital, even in the limited sense of food or
money 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 of the 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 the year. Thus we have a
laborer without capital and without wages, and an employer whose
capital is largely his employees’ wages. It is an unsatisfactory
arrangement, both for hirer and hired, and is usually in vogue on
poor land with hard-pressed owners.
Above the croppers come the great mass of the black population
who work the land on their own responsibility, paying rent in cotton
and supported by the crop-mortgage system. After the war this
system was attractive to the freedmen on account of its larger
freedom and its possibility for making a surplus. But with the
carrying out of the crop-lien system, the deterioration of the land,
and the slavery of debt, the position of the metayers has sunk to a
dead level of practically unrewarded toil. Formerly all tenants had
some capital, and often considerable; but absentee landlordism,
rising rack-rent, and failing cotton have stripped them well-nigh of
all, and probably not over half of them to-day own their mules. The
change from cropper to tenant was accomplished by fixing the rent.
If, now, the rent fixed was reasonable, 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 to discourage and check the efforts
of the black peasantry. There is no doubt that the latter case is true;
that in Dougherty County every economic advantage of the price of
cotton in market and of the strivings of the tenant has been taken
advantage of by the landlords and merchants, and swallowed up in
rent and interest. If cotton rose in price, the rent rose even higher; if
cotton fell, the rent remained or followed reluctantly. If the tenant
worked hard and raised a large crop, his rent was raised the next
year; if that year the crop failed, his corn was confiscated and his
mule sold for debt. There were, of course, exceptions to this,—cases
of personal kindness and forbearance; but in the vast majority of
cases the rule was to extract the uttermost farthing from the mass of
the black farm laborers.

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The average metayer pays from twenty to thirty per cent of his
crop in rent. The result of such rack-rent can only be evil,—abuse
and neglect of the soil, deterioration in the character of the laborers,
and a widespread sense of injustice. “Wherever the country is poor,”
cried Arthur Young, “it is in the hands of metayers,” and “their
condition is more wretched than that of day-laborers.” He was
talking of Italy 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 before the Revolution: “The metayers are
considered as little better than menial servants, removable at
pleasure, and obliged to conform in all things to the will of the
landlords.” On this low plane half the black population of Dougherty
County—perhaps more than half the black millions of this land—are
to-day struggling.
A degree above these we may place those laborers who receive
money wages for their work. Some receive a house with perhaps a
garden-spot; then supplies of food and clothing are advanced, and
certain fixed wages 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 per cent of the population belong to this
class of semi-metayers, while twenty-two per cent are laborers paid
by the month or year, and are either “furnished” by their own savings
or perhaps more usually by some merchant who takes his chances of
payment. Such laborers receive from thirty-five to fifty cents a day
during the working season. They are usually young unmarried
persons, some being women; and when they marry they sink to the
class of metayers, or, more seldom, become renters.
The renters for fixed money rentals are the first of the emerging
classes, and form five per cent of the families. The sole advantage of
this small class is their freedom to choose their crops, and the
increased responsibility which comes through having money
transactions. While some of the renters differ little in condition from
the metayers, yet on the whole they are more intelligent and
responsible persons, and are the ones who eventually become land-
owners. Their better character and greater shrewdness enable them to
gain, perhaps to demand, better terms in rents; rented farms, varying
from forty to a hundred acres, bear an average rental of about fifty-
four dollars a year. The men who conduct such farms do not long
remain renters; either they sink to metayers, or with a successful
series of harvests rise to be land-owners.
In 1870 the tax-books of Dougherty report no Negroes as
landholders. If there were any such at that time,—and there may
have been a few,—their land was probably held in the name of some
white patron,—a method not uncommon during slavery. In 1875
ownership of land had begun with seven hundred and fifty acres; ten
years later this had increased to over sixty-five hundred acres, to nine
thousand acres in 1890 and ten thousand in 1900. The total assessed
property has in this same period risen from eighty thousand dollars in
1875 to two hundred and forty thousand dollars in 1900.
Two circumstances complicate this development and make it in
some respects difficult to be sure of the real tendencies; they are the
panic of 1893, and the low price of cotton in 1898. Besides this, the
system of assessing property in the country districts of Georgia is
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somewhat antiquated and of uncertain statistical value; there are no

assessors, and each man makes a sworn return to a tax-receiver. Thus
public opinion plays a large part, and the returns vary strangely from
year to year. Certainly these figures show the small amount of
accumulated capital among the Negroes, and the consequent large
dependence of their property on temporary prosperity. They have
little to tide over a few years of economic 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 a transient
class, continually being depleted by those who fall back into the class
of renters or metayers, and augmented by newcomers from the
masses. Of one hundred land-owners in 1898, half had bought their
land since 1893, a fourth between 1890 and 1893, a fifth between
1884 and 1890, and the rest between 1870 and 1884. In all, one
hundred and eighty-five Negroes have owned land in this county
since 1875.
If all the black land-owners who had ever held land here had kept
it or left it in the hands of black men, the Negroes would have owned
nearer thirty thousand acres than the fifteen thousand they now hold.
And yet these fifteen thousand acres are a creditable showing,—a
proof of no little weight of the worth and ability of the Negro people.
If they had been given an economic start at Emancipation, if they had
been in an enlightened and rich community which really desired their
best good, then we might perhaps call such a result small or even
insignificant. But for a few thousand poor ignorant field-hands, in the
face of poverty, a falling market, and social stress, to save and
capitalize two hundred thousand dollars in a generation has meant a
tremendous effort. The rise of a nation, the pressing forward of a
social class, means a bitter struggle, a hard and soul-sickening battle
with the world such as few of the more favored classes know or
appreciate.
Out of the hard economic conditions of this portion of the Black
Belt, only six per cent of the population have succeeded in emerging
into peasant proprietorship; and these are not all firmly fixed, but
grow and shrink in number with the wavering of the cotton-market.
Fully ninety-four per cent have struggled for land and failed, and half
of them sit in hopeless serfdom. For these there is one other avenue
of escape toward which they have turned in increasing numbers,
namely, migration to town. A glance at the distribution of land
among the black owners curiously reveals this fact. In 1898 the
holdings were as follows: Under forty acres, forty-nine families;
forty to two hundred and fifty acres, seventeen families; two hundred
and fifty to one thousand acres, thirteen families; one thousand or
more acres, two families. Now in 1890 there were forty-four
holdings, but only nine of these were under forty acres. The great
increase of holdings, then, has come in the buying of small
homesteads near town, where their owners really share in the town
life; this is a part of the rush to town. And for every land-owner who
has thus hurried away from the narrow and hard conditions of
country life, how many field-hands, how many tenants, how many
ruined renters, have joined that long procession? Is it not strange
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

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County, and perhaps in many places near and far, look for their final
healing without the city walls.

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IX.
Of the Sons of Master and Man
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 races of men

is to have new exemplification during the new century. Indeed, the
characteristic of our age is the contact of European civilization with
the world’s undeveloped peoples. Whatever we may say of the
results of such contact in the past, it certainly forms a chapter in
human action not pleasant to look back upon. War, murder, slavery,
extermination, and debauchery,—this has again and again been the
result of carrying civilization and the blessed gospel to the isles of
the sea and the heathen without the law. Nor does it altogether satisfy
the conscience of the modern world to be told complacently that all
this has been right and proper, the fated triumph of strength over
weakness, of righteousness over evil, of superiors over inferiors. It
would certainly be soothing if one could readily believe all this; and
yet there are too many ugly facts for everything to be thus easily
explained away. We feel and know that there are many delicate
differences in race psychology, numberless changes that our crude
social measurements are not yet able to follow minutely, which
explain much of history and social development. At the same time,
too, we know that these considerations have never adequately
explained or excused the triumph of brute force and cunning over
weakness and innocence.
It is, then, the strife of all honorable men of the twentieth century
to see that in the future competition of races the survival of 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
fine and noble and strong, and not continue to put a premium on
greed and impudence and cruelty. To bring this hope to fruition, we
are compelled daily to turn more and more to a conscientious study
of the phenomena of race-contact,—to a study frank and fair, and not
falsified and colored by our wishes or our fears. And we have in the
South as fine a field for such a study as the world affords,—a field, to
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be sure, which the average American scientist deems somewhat

beneath his dignity, and which the average man who is not a scientist
knows all about, but nevertheless a line of study which by reason of
the enormous race complications with which God seems about to
punish this nation must 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 be answered, not by apology or
fault-finding, but by a plain, unvarnished tale.
In the civilized life of to-day the contact of men and their relations
to each other fall in a few main lines of action and communication:
there is, first, the physical proximity of home and dwelling-places,
the way in which neighborhoods group themselves, and the
contiguity of neighborhoods. Secondly, and in our age chiefest, there
are the economic relations,—the methods by which individuals
cooperate for earning a living, for the mutual satisfaction of wants,
for the production of wealth. Next, there are the political relations,
the cooperation in social control, in group government, in laying and
paying the burden of taxation. In the fourth place there are the less
tangible but highly important forms of intellectual contact and
commerce, the interchange of ideas through conversation and
conference, through periodicals and libraries; and, above all, the
gradual formation for each community of that curious tertium quid
which we call public opinion. Closely allied with this come the
various forms of social contact in everyday life, in travel, in theatres,
in house gatherings, in marrying and giving in marriage. Finally,
there are the varying forms of religious enterprise, of moral teaching
and benevolent endeavor. These are the principal ways in which men
living in the same communities are brought into 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 the
whites in these matters of everyday life.
First, as to physical dwelling. It is usually possible to draw in
nearly every Southern community a physical color-line on the map,
on the one side of which whites dwell and on the other Negroes. The
winding and intricacy of the geographical color-line varies, of
course, in different communities. I know some towns where a
straight line drawn through the middle of the main street separates
nine-tenths of the whites from nine-tenths of the blacks. In other
towns the older settlement of whites has been encircled by a broad
band of blacks; in still other cases little settlements or nuclei of
blacks have sprung up amid surrounding whites. Usually in cities
each street has its distinctive color, and only now and then do the
colors meet in close proximity. Even in the country something of this
segregation is manifest in the smaller areas, and of course in the
larger phenomena of the Black Belt.
All this segregation by color is largely independent of that natural
clustering by social grades common to all communities. A Negro
slum may be in dangerous proximity to a white residence quarter,
while it is quite common to find a white slum planted in the heart of
a respectable Negro district. One thing, however, seldom occurs: the
best of the whites and the best of the Negroes almost never live in
anything like close proximity. It thus happens that in nearly every
Southern town and city, both whites and blacks see commonly the

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worst of each other. This is a vast change from the situation in the
past, when, through the close contact of master and house-servant in
the patriarchal big house, one found the best of both races in close
contact and sympathy, while at the same time the squalor and dull
round of toil among the field-hands was removed from the sight and
hearing of the family. One can easily see how a person who saw
slavery thus from 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 do not have the black man’s
best interests at heart has been intensified in later years by this
continual daily contact of the better class of blacks with the worst
representatives of the white race.
Coming now to the economic relations of the races, we are on
ground made familiar by study, much discussion, and no little
philanthropic effort. And yet with all this there are many essential
elements in the cooperation of Negroes and whites for work and
wealth that are too readily overlooked or not thoroughly understood.
The average American can easily conceive of a rich land awaiting
development and filled with black laborers. To him the Southern
problem is simply that of making efficient workingmen out of this
material, by giving them the requisite technical skill and the help of
invested capital. The problem, however, is by no means as simple as
this, from the obvious fact that these workingmen have been trained
for centuries as slaves. They exhibit, therefore, all the advantages
and defects of such training; 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 the verge of
exploitation, as seems probable, then we have a mass of workingmen
thrown into relentless competition with the workingmen of the
world, but handicapped by a training the very opposite to that of the
modern self-reliant democratic laborer. What the black laborer needs
is careful personal guidance, group leadership of men with hearts in
their bosoms, to train them to foresight, carefulness, and honesty.
Nor does it require any fine-spun theories of racial differences to
prove the necessity of such group training after the brains of the race
have been knocked out by two hundred and fifty years of assiduous
education in submission, carelessness, and stealing. After
Emancipation, it was the plain duty of some one to assume this group
leadership and training of the Negro laborer. I will not stop here to
inquire whose duty it 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 the National Government whose
edict freed the bondmen; I will not stop to ask whose duty it was, but
I insist it was the duty of some one to see that these workingmen
were not left alone and unguided, without capital, without land,
without skill, without economic organization, without even the bald
protection of law, order, and decency,—left in a great land, not to
settle down to slow and careful internal development, but destined to
be thrown almost immediately into relentless and sharp competition
with the best of modern workingmen under an economic system
where every participant is fighting for himself, and too often utterly
regardless of the rights or welfare of his neighbor.

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For we must never forget that the economic system of the South
to-day which has succeeded the old regime is not the same system as
that of the old industrial North, of England, or of France, with their
trade-unions, their restrictive laws, their written and unwritten
commercial customs, and their long experience. It is, rather, a copy
of that England of the early nineteenth century, before the factory
acts,—the England that wrung pity from thinkers and fired the wrath
of Carlyle. The rod of empire that passed from the hands of Southern
gentlemen in 1865, partly by force, partly by their own petulance,
has never returned to them. Rather it has passed to those men who
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 of these men the Southern laborers, white
and black, have fallen; and this to their sorrow. For the laborers as
such, there is in these new captains of industry neither love nor hate,
neither sympathy nor romance; it is a cold question of dollars and
dividends. Under such a system all labor is bound to suffer. Even the
white laborers are not yet intelligent, thrifty, and well trained enough
to maintain themselves against the powerful inroads of organized
capital. The results among them, even, are long hours of toil, low
wages, child labor, and lack of protection against usury and cheating.
But among the black laborers all this is aggravated, first, by a race
prejudice which varies from a doubt and distrust among the best
element of whites to a frenzied hatred among the worst; and,
secondly, it is aggravated, as I have said before, by the wretched
economic heritage of the freedmen from slavery. With this training it
is difficult for the freedman to learn to grasp the opportunities
already opened to him, and the new opportunities are seldom given
him, but go by favor to the whites.
Left by the best elements of the South with little protection or
oversight, he has been made in law and custom the victim of the
worst and most unscrupulous men in each community. The crop-lien
system which is depopulating the fields of the South is not simply the
result of shiftlessness on the part of Negroes, but is also the result of
cunningly devised laws as to mortgages, liens, and misdemeanors,
which can be made by conscienceless 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 of Georgia, an ignorant, honest
Negro buy and pay for a farm in installments three separate times,
and then in the face of law and decency the enterprising American
who sold it to him pocketed the money and deed and left the black
man landless, to labor on his own land at thirty cents a day. I have
seen a black farmer fall in debt to a white storekeeper, and that
storekeeper go to his farm and strip it of every single marketable
article,—mules, ploughs, stored crops, tools, furniture, bedding,
clocks, looking-glass,—and all this without 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 a
class of ignorant toilers are placed by custom and race-prejudice
beyond the pale of sympathy and race-brotherhood. So long as the
best elements of a community do not feel in duty bound to protect

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and train and care for the weaker members of their group, they leave
them to be preyed upon by these swindlers and rascals.
This unfortunate economic situation does not mean the hindrance
of all advance in the black South, or the absence of a class of black
landlords and mechanics who, in spite of disadvantages, are
accumulating property and making good citizens. But it does mean
that this class is not nearly so large as a fairer economic system
might easily make it, that those who survive in the competition are
handicapped so as to accomplish much less than they deserve to, and
that, above all, the personnel of the successful class is left to chance
and accident, and not to any intelligent culling or reasonable methods
of selection. As a remedy for this, there is but one possible
procedure. We must accept some of the race prejudice in the South as
a fact,—deplorable in its intensity, unfortunate in results, and
dangerous for the future, but nevertheless a hard fact which only time
can efface. 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 and self-sacrificing leadership of the blacks
which their present situation so eloquently demands. Such
leadership, such social teaching and example, must come from the
blacks themselves. For some time men doubted as to whether the
Negro could develop such leaders; but to-day no one seriously
disputes the capability of individual Negroes to assimilate the culture
and common sense of modern civilization, and to pass it on, to some
extent at least, to their fellows. 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 and intelligence,—men of skill,
men of light and leading, college-bred men, black captains of
industry, and missionaries of culture; men who thoroughly
comprehend and know modern civilization, and can take hold of
Negro communities and raise and train them by force of precept and
example, deep sympathy, and the inspiration of common blood and
ideals. But if such men are to be effective they must have some
power,—they must be backed by the best public opinion of these
communities, and able to wield for their objects and aims such
weapons as the experience of the world has taught are indispensable
to human progress.
Of such weapons the greatest, perhaps, in the modern world is the
power of the ballot; and this brings me to a consideration of the third
form of contact between whites and blacks in the South,—political
activity.
In the attitude of the American mind toward Negro suffrage can be
traced with unusual accuracy the prevalent conceptions of
government. In the fifties we were near enough the echoes of the
French Revolution to believe pretty thoroughly in universal suffrage.
We argued, as we thought then rather logically, that no social class
was so good, so true, and so disinterested as to be trusted wholly
with the political destiny of its neighbors; that in every state the best
arbiters of their own welfare are the persons directly affected;
consequently that it is only by arming every hand with 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

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answered them tersely and convincingly; if some one complained of

the ignorance of voters, we answered, “Educate them.” If another
complained of their venality, we replied, “Disfranchise them or put
them in jail.” And, finally, to the men who feared demagogues and
the natural perversity of some human beings we insisted that time
and bitter experience would teach the most hardheaded. It was 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 protected from those who did not believe in their freedom and
were determined to thwart it? Not by force, said the North; not by
government guardianship, said the South; 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 the ex-slaves could use
the ballot intelligently or very effectively; but they did think that the
possession of so great power by a great class in the nation would
compel their fellows to educate this class to its intelligent use.
Meantime, new thoughts came to the nation: the inevitable period
of moral retrogression and political trickery that ever follows in the
wake of war overtook us. So flagrant became the political scandals
that reputable men began to leave politics alone, and politics
consequently became disreputable. Men began to pride themselves
on having nothing to do with their own government, and to agree
tacitly with those who regarded public office as a private perquisite.
In this state of mind it became easy to wink at the suppression of the
Negro vote in the South, and to advise self-respecting Negroes to
leave politics entirely alone. The decent and reputable citizens of the
North who neglected their own civic duties grew hilarious over the
exaggerated importance with which the Negro regarded the
franchise. Thus it easily happened that more and more the better
class of Negroes followed the advice from abroad and the pressure
from home, and took no further interest in politics, leaving to the
careless and the venal of their race the exercise of their rights as
voters. The black vote that still remained was not trained and
educated, but further debauched by open and unblushing bribery, or
force and fraud; until the Negro voter was thoroughly inoculated
with the idea that politics was a method of private gain by
disreputable means.
And finally, now, to-day, when we are awakening to the fact that
the perpetuity of republican institutions on this continent depends on
the purification of the ballot, the civic training of voters, and the
raising of voting to the plane of a solemn duty which a patriotic
citizen neglects to his peril and to the peril of his children’s children,
—in this day, when we are striving for a renaissance of civic virtue,
what are we going to say to the black voter of the South? Are we
going to tell him still that politics is a disreputable and useless form
of human activity? Are we going to induce 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 am not saying a word
against all legitimate efforts to purge the ballot of ignorance,
pauperism, and crime. But few have pretended that the present
movement for disfranchisement in the South is for such a purpose; it
has been plainly and frankly declared in nearly every case that the
object of the disfranchising laws is the elimination of the black man
from politics.
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Now, is this a minor matter which has no influence on the main

question of the industrial and intellectual development of the Negro?
Can we establish a mass of black laborers and artisans and
landholders in the South who, by law and public opinion, have
absolutely no voice in shaping the laws under which they live and
work? Can the modern organization of industry, assuming as it does
free democratic government and the power and ability of the laboring
classes to compel respect for their welfare,—can this system be
carried out in the South when half its laboring force is voiceless in
the public councils and powerless in its own defence? To-day the
black man of the South has almost nothing to say as to how much he
shall be taxed, or how those taxes shall be expended; as to who shall
execute the laws, and how they shall do it; as to who shall make the
laws, and how they shall be made. It is pitiable that frantic efforts
must be made at critical times to get law-makers in some States even
to listen to the respectful presentation of the black man’s side of a
current controversy. Daily the Negro is coming more and more to
look upon law and justice, not as protecting safeguards, but as
sources of humiliation and oppression. The laws are made by men
who have little interest in him; they are executed by men who have
absolutely no motive for treating the black people with courtesy or
consideration; and, finally, the accused law-breaker is tried, not by
his peers, but too often by men who would rather punish ten innocent
Negroes than let one guilty one escape.
I should be the last one to deny the patent weaknesses and
shortcomings of the Negro people; I should be the last to withhold
sympathy from the white South in its efforts to solve its intricate
social problems. I freely acknowledged that it is possible, and
sometimes best, that a partially undeveloped people should be ruled
by the best of their stronger and better neighbors for their own good,
until such time as they can start and fight the world’s battles alone. I
have already pointed out how sorely in need of such economic and
spiritual guidance the emancipated Negro was, and I am quite willing
to admit that if the representatives of the best white Southern public
opinion were the ruling and guiding powers in the South to-day the
conditions indicated would be fairly well fulfilled. But the point I
have insisted upon and now emphasize again, is that the best opinion
of the South to-day is not the ruling opinion. That to leave the Negro
helpless and without a ballot to-day is to leave him not to the
guidance of the best, but rather to the exploitation and debauchment
of the worst; that this is no truer of the South than of the North,—of
the North than of Europe: in any land, in any country under modern
free competition, to lay any class of weak and despised people, be
they white, black, or blue, at the political mercy of their stronger,
richer, and more resourceful fellows, is a temptation which human
nature seldom has withstood and seldom will withstand.
Moreover, the political status of the Negro in the South is closely
connected with the question of Negro crime. There can be no doubt
that crime among Negroes has sensibly increased in the last thirty
years, and that there has appeared in the slums of great cities a
distinct criminal class among the blacks. In explaining this
unfortunate development, we must note two things: (1) that the
inevitable result of Emancipation was to increase crime and
criminals, and (2) that the police system of the South was primarily
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designed to control slaves. As to the first point, we must not forget

that under a strict slave system there can scarcely be such a thing as
crime. But when these variously constituted human particles are
suddenly thrown broadcast on the sea of life, some swim, some sink,
and some hang suspended, to be forced up or down by the chance
currents of a busy hurrying world. So great an economic and social
revolution as swept the South in ’63 meant a weeding out among the
Negroes of the incompetents and vicious, the beginning of a
differentiation of social grades. Now a rising group of people are not
lifted bodily from the ground like an inert solid mass, but rather
stretch upward like a living plant with its roots still clinging in the
mould. The appearance, therefore, of the Negro criminal was a
phenomenon to be awaited; and while it causes anxiety, it should not
occasion surprise.
Here again the hope for the future depended peculiarly on careful
and delicate dealing with these criminals. Their offences at first were
those of laziness, carelessness, and impulse, rather than of malignity
or ungoverned viciousness. Such misdemeanors needed
discriminating treatment, firm but reformatory, with no hint of
injustice, and full proof of guilt. For such dealing with criminals,
white or black, the South had no machinery, no adequate jails or
reformatories; its police system was arranged to deal with blacks
alone, and tacitly assumed that every white man was ipso facto a
member of that police. Thus grew up a double system of justice,
which erred on the white side by undue leniency and the practical
immunity of red-handed criminals, and erred on the black side by
undue severity, injustice, and lack of discrimination. For, as I have
said, the police system of the South was originally designed to keep
track of all Negroes, not simply of criminals; and when the Negroes
were freed and the whole South was convinced of the impossibility
of free Negro labor, the first and almost universal device was to use
the courts as a means of reenslaving the blacks. It was not then a
question of crime, but rather one of color, that settled a man’s
conviction on almost any charge. Thus Negroes came to look upon
courts as instruments of injustice and oppression, and upon those
convicted in them as martyrs and victims.
When, now, the real Negro criminal appeared, and instead of 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: the Negroes refused to believe the evidence of white witnesses
or the fairness of white juries, so that the greatest deterrent to crime,
the public opinion of one’s own social caste, was lost, and the
criminal was looked upon as crucified rather than hanged. On the
other hand, the whites, used to being careless as to the guilt or
innocence of accused Negroes, were swept in moments of passion
beyond law, reason, and decency. Such a situation is bound to
increase crime, and has increased it. To natural viciousness and
vagrancy are being daily added motives of revolt and revenge which
stir up all the latent savagery of both races and make peaceful
attention to economic development often impossible.
But the chief problem in any community cursed with crime is not
the punishment of the criminals, but the preventing of the young
from being trained to crime. And here again the peculiar conditions

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of the South have prevented proper precautions. I have seen twelve-

year-old boys working in chains on the public streets of Atlanta,
directly in front of the schools, in company with old and hardened
criminals; and this indiscriminate mingling of men and women and
children makes the chain-gangs perfect schools of crime and
debauchery. The struggle for reformatories, which has gone on in
Virginia, Georgia, and other States, is the one encouraging sign of
the awakening of some communities 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-respecting citizens.
We have been so hotly engaged recently in discussing trade-schools
and the higher education that the pitiable plight of the public-school
system in the South has almost dropped from view. Of every five
dollars spent for public education in the State of Georgia, the white
schools get four dollars and the Negro one dollar; and even then the
white public-school system, save in the cities, is bad and cries for
reform. If this is true of the whites, what of the blacks? I am
becoming more and more convinced, as I look upon the system of
common-school training in the South, that the national government
must soon step in and aid popular education in some way. To-day it
has been only by the most strenuous efforts on the part of the
thinking men of the South that the Negro’s share of the school fund
has not been cut down to a pittance in some half-dozen States; and
that movement not only is not dead, but in many communities is
gaining strength. What in the name of reason does this nation expect
of a people, poorly trained and hard pressed in severe economic
competition, without political rights, and with ludicrously inadequate
common-school facilities? What can it expect but crime and
listlessness, offset here and there by the dogged struggles of the
fortunate and more determined who are themselves buoyed by the
hope that in due time the country will come to its senses?
I have thus far sought to make clear the physical, economic, and
political relations of the Negroes and whites in the South, as I have
conceived them, including, for the reasons set forth, crime and
education. But after all that has been said on these more tangible
matters of human contact, there still remains a part essential to a
proper description of the South which it is difficult to describe or fix
in terms easily understood by strangers. 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 community or nation it is
these little things which are most elusive to the grasp and yet most
essential to any clear conception of the group life taken as a whole.
What is thus true of all communities is peculiarly true of the South,
where, outside of written history and outside of printed law, there has
been going on for a generation as deep a storm and stress of human
souls, as intense a ferment of feeling, as intricate a writhing of spirit,
as ever a people experienced. Within and without the sombre veil of
color vast social forces have been at work,—efforts for human
betterment, movements toward disintegration and despair, tragedies
and comedies in social and economic life, and a swaying and lifting
and sinking of human hearts which have made this land a land of
mingled sorrow and joy, of change and excitement and unrest.

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The centre of this spiritual turmoil has ever been the millions of
black freedmen and their sons, whose destiny is so fatefully bound
up with that of the nation. And yet the casual observer visiting the
South sees at first little of this. He notes the growing frequency of
dark faces as he rides along,—but otherwise the days slip lazily on,
the sun shines, and this little world seems as happy and contented as
other worlds he has visited. Indeed, on the question of questions—
the Negro problem—he hears so little that there almost seems to be a
conspiracy of silence; the morning papers seldom mention it, and
then usually in a far-fetched academic way, and indeed almost every
one seems to forget and ignore the darker half of the land, until the
astonished visitor is inclined to ask if after all there IS any problem
here. But if he lingers long enough there comes the awakening:
perhaps in a sudden whirl of passion which leaves him gasping at its
bitter intensity; more likely in a gradually dawning sense of things he
had not at first noticed. Slowly but surely his eyes begin to catch the
shadows of the color-line: here he meets crowds of Negroes and
whites; then he is suddenly aware that he cannot discover a single
dark face; or again at the close of a day’s wandering he may find
himself in some strange assembly, where all faces are tinged brown
or black, and where he has the vague, uncomfortable feeling of the
stranger. He realizes at last that silently, resistlessly, the world about
flows by him in two great streams: they ripple on in the same
sunshine, they approach and mingle their waters in seeming
carelessness,—then they divide and flow wide apart. It is done
quietly; no mistakes are made, or if one occurs, the swift arm of the
law and of public opinion swings down for a moment, as when the
other day a black man and a white woman were arrested for talking
together on Whitehall Street in Atlanta.
Now if one notices carefully one will see that between these two
worlds, despite much physical contact and daily intermingling, there
is almost no community of intellectual life or point of transference
where the thoughts and feelings of one race can come into direct
contact and sympathy with 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 the white families, there were
bonds of intimacy, affection, and sometimes blood relationship,
between the races. They lived in the same home, shared in the family
life, often attended the same church, and talked and conversed with
each other. But the increasing civilization of the Negro since then has
naturally meant the development of higher classes: there are
increasing numbers of ministers, 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 or no intellectual
commerce. They go to separate churches, they live in separate
sections, they are strictly separated in all public gatherings, they
travel separately, and they are beginning to read different papers and
books. To most libraries, lectures, concerts, and museums, Negroes
are either not admitted at all, or on terms peculiarly galling to the
pride of the very classes who might otherwise be attracted. The daily
paper chronicles the doings of 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
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for social betterment, and the like,—it is usually true that the very
representatives of the two races, who for mutual benefit and the
welfare of the land ought to be in complete understanding and
sympathy, are so far strangers that one side thinks all whites are
narrow and prejudiced, and the other thinks educated Negroes
dangerous and insolent. Moreover, in a land where the tyranny of
public opinion and the intolerance of criticism is for obvious
historical reasons so strong as in the South, such a situation is
extremely difficult to correct. The white man, as well as the Negro, is
bound and barred by the color-line, and many a scheme of
friendliness and philanthropy, of broad-minded sympathy and
generous fellowship between the two has dropped still-born because
some busybody has forced the color-question to the front and
brought the tremendous force of unwritten law against the
innovators.
It is hardly necessary for me to add very much in regard to the
social contact between the races. Nothing has come to replace that
finer sympathy and love between some masters and house servants
which the radical and more uncompromising drawing of the color-
line in recent years has caused almost completely to disappear. In a
world where it means so much to take a man by the hand and sit
beside him, to look frankly into his eyes and feel his heart beating
with red blood; in a world where a social cigar or a cup of tea
together means more than legislative halls and magazine articles and
speeches,—one can imagine the consequences of the almost utter
absence of such social amenities between estranged races, whose
separation extends even to parks and streetcars.
Here there can be none of that social going down to the people,—
the opening of heart and hand of the best to the worst, in generous
acknowledgment of a common humanity and a common destiny. On
the other hand, in matters of simple almsgiving, where there can be
no question of social contact, and in the succor of the aged and sick,
the South, as if stirred by a feeling of its unfortunate limitations, is
generous to a fault. The black beggar is never turned away without a
good deal more than a crust, and a call for help for the unfortunate
meets quick response. I remember, one cold winter, in Atlanta, when
I refrained from contributing to a public relief fund lest Negroes
should be discriminated against, I afterward inquired of a friend:
“Were any black people receiving aid?” “Why,” said he, “they were
all black.”
And yet this does not touch the kernel of the problem. Human
advancement is not a mere question of almsgiving, but rather of
sympathy and cooperation among classes who would scorn charity.
And here is a land where, in the higher walks of life, in all the higher
striving for the good and noble 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, and the brothel, that
same line wavers and disappears.

I have sought to paint an average picture of real relations between

the sons of master and man in the South. I have not glossed over
matters for policy’s sake, for I fear we have already gone too far in
that sort of thing. On the other hand, I have sincerely sought to let no
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unfair exaggerations creep in. I do not doubt that in some Southern

communities conditions are better than those I have indicated; while
I am no less certain that in other communities they are far worse.
Nor does the paradox and danger of this situation fail to interest
and perplex the best conscience of the South. 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 the caste-
levelling precepts of Christianity, or believe in equality of
opportunity for all men, without coming to feel more and more with
each generation that the present drawing of the color-line is a flat
contradiction to their beliefs and professions. But just as often as
they come to this point, the present social condition of the Negro
stands as a menace and a portent before even the most open-minded:
if there were nothing to charge against the Negro but his blackness or
other physical peculiarities, they argue, the problem would be
comparatively simple; but what can we say to his ignorance,
shiftlessness, poverty, and crime? can a self-respecting group hold
anything but the least possible fellowship with such persons and
survive? and shall we let a mawkish sentiment sweep away the
culture of our fathers or the hope of our children? The argument so
put is of great strength, but it is not a whit stronger than the argument
of thinking Negroes: granted, they reply, that the condition of our
masses is bad; there is certainly on the one hand adequate historical
cause for this, and unmistakable evidence that no small number have,
in spite of tremendous disadvantages, risen to the level of American
civilization. And when, by proscription and prejudice, these same
Negroes are classed with and treated like the lowest of their people,
simply because they are Negroes, such a policy not only discourages
thrift and intelligence among black men, but puts a direct premium
on the very things you complain of,—inefficiency and crime. Draw
lines of crime, of incompetency, of vice, as tightly and
uncompromisingly as you will, for these things must be proscribed;
but a color-line not only does not accomplish this purpose, but
thwarts it.
In the face of two such arguments, the future of the South depends
on the ability of the representatives of these opposing views to see
and appreciate and sympathize with each other’s position,—for the
Negro to realize more deeply than he does at present the need of
uplifting the masses of his people, for the white people to realize
more vividly than they have yet done the deadening and disastrous
effect of a color-prejudice that classes Phillis 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 South to
reply that their social condition is the main cause of prejudice. They
both act as reciprocal cause and effect, and a change in neither alone
will bring the desired effect. Both must change, or neither can
improve to any great extent. The Negro cannot stand the present
reactionary tendencies and unreasoning drawing of the color-line
indefinitely without discouragement and retrogression. And the
condition of the Negro is ever the excuse for further discrimination.

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Only by a union of intelligence and sympathy across the color-line in

this critical period of the Republic shall justice and right triumph,
“That mind and soul according well,
May make one music as before,
But vaster.”

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X.
Of the Faith of the Fathers
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 my foster home,
on a dark Sunday night. The road wandered from our rambling log-
house up the stony bed of a creek, past wheat and corn, until we
could hear dimly across the fields a rhythmic cadence of song,—soft,
thrilling, powerful, that swelled and died sorrowfully in our ears. I
was a country schoolteacher then, fresh from the East, and had never
seen a Southern Negro revival. To be sure, we in Berkshire were not
perhaps as stiff and formal as they in Suffolk of olden time; yet we
were very quiet and subdued, and I know not what would have
happened those clear Sabbath mornings had some one punctuated the
sermon with a wild scream, or interrupted the long prayer with a loud
Amen! And so most striking to me, as I approached the village and
the little plain church perched aloft, was the air of intense excitement
that possessed that mass of black folk. A sort of suppressed terror
hung in the air and seemed to seize us,—a pythian madness, a
demoniac possession, that lent terrible reality to song and word. The
black and massive form of the preacher swayed and quivered as the
words crowded to his lips and flew at us in singular eloquence. The
people moaned and fluttered, and then the gaunt-cheeked brown
woman beside me suddenly leaped straight into the air and shrieked
like a lost soul, while round about came wail and groan and outcry,
and a scene of human passion such as I had never conceived before.
Those who have not thus witnessed the frenzy of a Negro revival
in the untouched backwoods of the South can but dimly realize the
religious feeling of the slave; as described, such scenes appear
grotesque and funny, but as seen they are awful. Three things
characterized this religion of the slave,—the Preacher, the Music,

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and the Frenzy. The Preacher is the most unique personality

developed by the Negro on American soil. A leader, a politician, an
orator, a “boss,” an intriguer, an idealist,—all these he is, and ever,
too, the centre of a group of men, now twenty, now a thousand in
number. The combination of a certain adroitness with deep-seated
earnestness, of tact with consummate ability, gave him his
preeminence, and helps 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 rhythmic melody,
with its touching minor cadences, which, despite caricature and
defilement, still remains the most original and beautiful expression of
human life and longing yet born on American soil. Sprung from the
African forests, where its counterpart can still be heard, it was
adapted, changed, and intensified by the tragic soul-life of the slave,
until, under the stress of law and whip, it became the one true
expression of a people’s sorrow, despair, and hope.
Finally the Frenzy of “Shouting,” when the Spirit of the Lord
passed by, and, seizing the devotee, made him mad with supernatural
joy, was the last essential of Negro religion and the one more
devoutly believed in than all the rest. It varied in expression from the
silent rapt countenance or the low murmur and moan to the mad
abandon of physical fervor,—the stamping, shrieking, and shouting,
the rushing to and fro and wild waving of arms, the weeping and
laughing, the vision and the trance. All this is nothing new in the
world, but old as religion, as Delphi and Endor. And so firm a hold
did it have on the Negro, that many generations firmly believed that
without this visible manifestation of the God there could be no true
communion with the Invisible.
These were the characteristics of Negro religious life as developed
up to the time of Emancipation. Since under the peculiar
circumstances of the black man’s environment they were the one
expression of his higher life, they are of deep interest to the student
of his development, both socially and psychologically. Numerous are
the attractive lines of inquiry that here group themselves. What did
slavery mean to the African savage? What was 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 were
his heart-burnings and disappointments? Answers to such questions
can come only from a study of Negro religion as a development,
through its gradual changes from the heathenism of the Gold Coast
to the institutional Negro church of Chicago.
Moreover, the religious growth of millions of men, even though
they be slaves, cannot be without potent influence upon their
contemporaries. The Methodists and Baptists of America owe much
of their condition to the silent but potent influence of their millions
of Negro converts. Especially is this noticeable in the South, where
theology and religious philosophy are on this account a long way
behind the North, and where the religion of the poor whites is a plain
copy of Negro thought and methods. The mass of “gospel” hymns
which has swept through American churches and well-nigh ruined
our sense of song consists largely of debased imitations of Negro
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melodies made by ears that caught the jingle but not the music, the
body but not the soul, of the Jubilee songs. It is thus clear that the
study of Negro religion is not only a vital part of the history of the
Negro in America, but no uninteresting part of American history.
The Negro church of to-day is the social centre of Negro life in the
United States, and the most characteristic expression of African
character. Take a typical church in a small Virginia town: it is the
“First Baptist”—a roomy brick edifice seating five hundred or more
persons, tastefully finished in Georgia pine, with a carpet, a small
organ, and stained-glass windows. Underneath is a large assembly
room with benches. This building is the central club-house of a
community of a thousand or more Negroes. Various organizations
meet here,—the church proper, the Sunday-school, two or three
insurance societies, women’s societies, secret societies, and mass
meetings of various kinds. Entertainments, suppers, and lectures are
held beside the five or six regular weekly religious services.
Considerable sums of money are collected and expended here,
employment is found for the idle, strangers are introduced, news is
disseminated and charity distributed. At the same time this social,
intellectual, and economic centre is a religious centre of great power.
Depravity, Sin, Redemption, Heaven, Hell, and Damnation are
preached twice a Sunday after the crops are laid by; and few indeed
of the community have the hardihood to withstand conversion. Back
of this more formal religion, the Church often stands as a real
conserver of morals, a strengthener of family life, and the final
authority on what is Good and Right.
Thus one can see in the Negro church to-day, reproduced in
microcosm, all the great world from which the Negro is cut off by
color-prejudice and social condition. In the great city churches the
same tendency is noticeable and in many respects emphasized. A
great church like the Bethel of Philadelphia has over eleven hundred
members, an edifice seating fifteen hundred persons and valued at
one hundred thousand dollars, an annual budget of five thousand
dollars, and a government consisting of a pastor with several
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, and
twenty-four auxiliary societies. The activity of a church like this is
immense and far-reaching, and the bishops who preside over these
organizations throughout the land are among the most powerful
Negro rulers in the world.
Such churches are really governments of men, and consequently a
little investigation reveals the curious fact that, in the South, at least,
practically every American Negro is a church member. Some, to be
sure, are not regularly enrolled, and a few do not habitually attend
services; but, practically, a proscribed people must have a social
centre, and that centre for this people is the Negro church. The
census of 1890 showed nearly twenty-four thousand Negro churches
in the country, with a total enrolled membership of over two and a
half millions, or ten actual church members to every twenty-eight
persons, and in some Southern States one in every two persons.
Besides these there is the large number who, while not enrolled as
members, attend and take part in many of the activities of the church.

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There is an organized Negro church for every sixty black families in

the nation, and in some States for every forty families, owning, on an
average, a thousand dollars’ worth of property each, or nearly
twenty-six million dollars in all.
Such, then, is the large development of the Negro church since
Emancipation. The question now is, What have been the successive
steps of this social history and what are the present tendencies? First,
we must realize that no such institution as the Negro church could
rear itself without definite historical foundations. These foundations
we can find if we remember that the social history of the Negro did
not start in America. He was brought from a definite social
environment,—the polygamous clan life under the headship of the
chief and the potent influence of the priest. His religion was nature-
worship, with profound belief in invisible surrounding influences,
good and bad, and his worship was through incantation and sacrifice.
The first rude change in this life was the slave ship and the West
Indian sugar-fields. The plantation organization replaced the clan and
tribe, and the white master replaced the chief with far greater and
more despotic powers. Forced and long-continued toil became the
rule of life, the old ties of blood relationship and kinship
disappeared, and instead of the family appeared a new polygamy and
polyandry, which, in some cases, almost reached promiscuity. It was
a terrific social revolution, and yet some traces were retained of the
former group life, and the chief remaining institution was the Priest
or Medicine-man. He early appeared on the plantation and found his
function as the healer of the sick, the interpreter of the Unknown, the
comforter of the sorrowing, the supernatural avenger of wrong, and
the one who rudely but picturesquely expressed the longing,
disappointment, and resentment of a stolen and oppressed people.
Thus, as bard, physician, judge, and priest, within the narrow limits
allowed by the slave system, rose the Negro preacher, and under him
the first church was not at first by any means Christian nor definitely
organized; rather it was an adaptation and mingling of heathen rites
among the members of each plantation, and roughly designated as
Voodooism. Association with the masters, missionary effort and
motives of expediency gave these rites an early veneer of
Christianity, and after the lapse of many generations the Negro
church became Christian.
Two characteristic things must be noticed in regard to the church.
First, it became almost entirely Baptist and Methodist in faith;
secondly, as a social institution it antedated by many decades the
monogamic Negro home. From the very circumstances of its
beginning, the church was confined to the plantation, and consisted
primarily of a series of disconnected units; although, later on, some
freedom of movement was allowed, still this geographical limitation
was always important and was one cause of the spread of the
decentralized and democratic Baptist faith among the slaves. At the
same time, the visible rite of baptism appealed strongly to their
mystic temperament. To-day the Baptist Church is still largest in
membership among Negroes, and has a million and a half
communicants. Next in popularity came the churches organized in
connection with the white neighboring churches, chiefly Baptist and
Methodist, with a few Episcopalian and others. The Methodists still
form the second greatest denomination, with nearly a million
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members. The faith of these two leading denominations was more

suited to the slave church from the prominence they gave to religious
feeling and fervor. The Negro membership in other denominations
has always been small and relatively unimportant, although the
Episcopalians and Presbyterians are gaining among the more
intelligent classes to-day, and the Catholic Church is making
headway in certain sections. After Emancipation, and still earlier in
the North, the Negro churches largely severed such affiliations as
they had had with the white churches, either by choice or by
compulsion. The Baptist churches became independent, but the
Methodists were compelled early to unite for purposes of episcopal
government. This gave rise to the great African Methodist Church,
the greatest Negro organization in the world, to the Zion Church and
the Colored Methodist, and to the black conferences and churches in
this and other denominations.
The second fact noted, namely, that the Negro church antedates the
Negro home, leads to an explanation of much that is paradoxical in
this communistic institution and in the morals of its members. But
especially it leads us to regard this institution as peculiarly the
expression of the inner ethical life of a people in a sense seldom true
elsewhere. Let us turn, then, from the outer physical development of
the church to the more important inner ethical life of the people who
compose it. The Negro has already been pointed out many times as a
religious animal,—a being of that deep emotional nature which turns
instinctively toward the supernatural. Endowed with a rich tropical
imagination and a keen, delicate appreciation of Nature, the
transplanted African lived in a world animate with gods and devils,
elves and witches; full of strange influences,—of Good to be
implored, of Evil to be propitiated. Slavery, then, was to him the dark
triumph of Evil over him. All the hateful powers of the Under-world
were striving against him, and a spirit of revolt and revenge filled his
heart. He called up all the resources of heathenism to aid,—exorcism
and witch-craft, the mysterious Obi worship with its barbarious rites,
spells, and blood-sacrifice even, now and then, of human victims.
Weird midnight orgies and mystic conjurations were invoked, the
witch-woman and the voodoo-priest became the centre of Negro
group life, and that vein of vague superstition which characterizes
the unlettered Negro even to-day was deepened and strengthened.
In spite, however, of such success as that of the fierce Maroons,
the Danish blacks, and others, the spirit of revolt gradually died away
under the untiring energy and superior strength of the slave masters.
By the middle of the eighteenth century the black slave had sunk,
with hushed murmurs, to his place at the bottom of a new economic
system, and was unconsciously ripe for a new philosophy of life.
Nothing suited his condition then better than the doctrines of passive
submission embodied in the newly learned Christianity. Slave
masters early realized this, and cheerfully aided religious propaganda
within certain bounds. The long system of repression and
degradation of the Negro tended to emphasize the elements of his
character which made him a valuable chattel: courtesy became
humility, moral strength degenerated into submission, and the
exquisite native appreciation of the beautiful became an infinite
capacity for dumb suffering. The Negro, losing the joy of this world,
eagerly seized upon the offered conceptions of the next; the avenging
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Spirit of the Lord enjoining patience in this world, under sorrow and
tribulation until the Great Day when He should lead His dark
children home,—this became his comforting dream. His preacher
repeated the prophecy, and his bards 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, the sensualist
side by side with the martyr. Under the lax moral life of the
plantation, where marriage was a farce, laziness a virtue, and
property a theft, a religion of resignation and submission degenerated
easily, in less strenuous minds, into a philosophy of indulgence and
crime. Many of the worst characteristics of the Negro masses of to-
day had their seed in this period of the slave’s ethical growth. Here it
was that the Home was ruined under the very shadow 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 the gradual
growth of a class of free Negroes came a change. We often neglect
the influence of the freedman before the war, because of the paucity
of his numbers and the small weight he had in the history of the
nation. But we must not forget that his chief influence was internal,
—was exerted on the black world; and that there he was the ethical
and social leader. Huddled as he was in a few centres like
Philadelphia, New York, and New Orleans, the masses of the
freedmen sank into poverty and listlessness; but not all of them. The
free Negro leader early arose and his chief characteristic was intense
earnestness and deep feeling on the slavery question. Freedom
became to him a real thing and not a dream. His religion became
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 the
Lord” swept this side of Death, and came to be a thing to be hoped
for in this day. Through fugitive slaves and irrepressible discussion
this desire for freedom seized the black millions still in bondage, and
became their one ideal of 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 and identified
itself with the dream of Abolition, until that which was a radical fad
in the white North and an anarchistic plot in the white South had
become a religion to the black world. Thus, when Emancipation
finally came, it seemed to the freedman a literal Coming of the Lord.
His fervid imagination was stirred as never before, by the tramp of
armies, the blood and dust of battle, and the wail and whirl of social
upheaval. He stood dumb and motionless before the whirlwind: what
had he to do with it? Was it not the Lord’s doing, and marvellous in
his eyes? Joyed and bewildered with what came, he stood awaiting
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new wonders till the inevitable Age of Reaction swept over the
nation and brought the crisis of to-day.
It is difficult to explain clearly the present critical stage of Negro
religion. First, we must remember that living as the blacks do in
close contact with a great modern nation, and sharing, although
imperfectly, the soul-life of that nation, they must necessarily be
affected more or less directly by all the religious and ethical forces
that are to-day moving the United States. These questions and
movements are, however, overshadowed and dwarfed by the (to
them) all-important question of their civil, political, and economic
status. They must perpetually discuss the “Negro Problem,”—must
live, move, and have their being in it, and interpret all else in its light
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 a time of intense ethical ferment, of religious
heart-searching and intellectual unrest. From the double life every
American Negro must live, as a Negro and as an American, as swept
on by the current of the nineteenth while yet struggling in the eddies
of the fifteenth century,—from this must arise a painful self-
consciousness, an almost morbid sense of personality and a moral
hesitancy which is fatal to self-confidence. The worlds within and
without the Veil of Color are changing, and changing rapidly, but not
at the same rate, not in the same way; and this must produce a
peculiar wrenching of the soul, a peculiar sense of doubt and
bewilderment. Such a double life, with double thoughts, double
duties, and double social classes, must give rise to double words and
double ideals, and tempt the mind to pretence or revolt, to hypocrisy
or radicalism.
In some such doubtful words and phrases can one perhaps most
clearly picture the peculiar ethical paradox that faces the Negro of to-
day and is tingeing and changing his religious life. Feeling that his
rights and his dearest ideals are being trampled upon, that the public
conscience is ever more deaf to his righteous appeal, and that all the
reactionary forces of prejudice, greed, and revenge are daily gaining
new strength and fresh allies, the Negro faces no enviable dilemma.
Conscious of his impotence, and pessimistic, he often becomes bitter
and vindictive; and his religion, instead of a worship, is a complaint
and a curse, a wail rather than a hope, a sneer rather than a faith. On
the other hand, another type of mind, shrewder and keener and more
tortuous too, sees in the very strength of the anti-Negro movement its
patent weaknesses, and with Jesuitic casuistry is deterred by no
ethical considerations in the endeavor to turn this weakness to the
black man’s strength. Thus we have two great and hardly
reconcilable streams of thought and ethical strivings; the danger of
the one lies in anarchy, that of the other in hypocrisy. The one type of
Negro stands almost ready to curse God and die, and the other is too
often found a traitor to right and a coward before force; the one 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 into black,—the triumph of the Lie which today,
with its false culture, faces the hideousness of the anarchist assassin?

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To-day the two groups of Negroes, the one in the North, the other
in the South, represent these divergent ethical tendencies, the first
tending toward radicalism, the other toward hypocritical
compromise. It is no idle 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 religious age of submission and humility.
With all his laziness and lack of many elements of true manhood, he
was at least open-hearted, faithful, and sincere. To-day he is gone,
but who is to blame for his going? Is it not those very persons who
mourn for him? Is it not the tendency, born of Reconstruction and
Reaction, to found a society on lawlessness and deception, to tamper
with the moral fibre of a naturally honest and straightforward people
until the whites threaten to become ungovernable tyrants and the
blacks criminals and hypocrites? Deception is the natural defence of
the weak against the strong, and the South used it for many years
against its conquerors; to-day it must be prepared to see its black
proletariat turn that same two-edged weapon against itself. And how
natural this is! The death of Denmark Vesey and Nat Turner proved
long since to the Negro the present hopelessness of physical defence.
Political defence is becoming less and less available, and economic
defence is still only partially effective. But there is a patent defence
at hand,—the defence of deception and flattery, of cajoling and lying.
It is the same defence which peasants of the Middle Age used and
which left its stamp on their character for centuries. To-day the
young Negro of the South who would succeed cannot be frank and
outspoken, honest and self-assertive, but rather he is daily tempted to
be silent and wary, politic and sly; he must flatter and be pleasant,
endure petty insults with a smile, shut his eyes to wrong; in too many
cases he sees positive personal advantage in deception and lying. His
real thoughts, his real aspirations, must be guarded in whispers; he
must not criticise, he must not complain. Patience, humility, and
adroitness must, in these growing black youth, replace impulse,
manliness, and courage. With this sacrifice there is an economic
opening, and perhaps peace and some prosperity. Without this there
is riot, migration, or crime. Nor is this situation peculiar to the
Southern United States, is it not rather the only method by which
undeveloped races have gained the right to share modern culture?
The price of culture is a Lie.
On the other hand, in the North the tendency is to emphasize the
radicalism of the Negro. Driven from his birthright in the South by a
situation at which every fibre of his more outspoken and assertive
nature revolts, he finds himself in a land where he can scarcely earn a
decent living amid the harsh competition and the color
discrimination. At the same time, through schools and periodicals,
discussions and lectures, he is intellectually quickened and
awakened. The soul, long pent up and dwarfed, suddenly expands in
new-found freedom. What wonder that every tendency is to excess,
—radical complaint, radical remedies, bitter denunciation or angry
silence. Some sink, some rise. The criminal and the sensualist leave
the church for the gambling-hell and the brothel, and fill the slums of
Chicago and Baltimore; the better classes segregate themselves from
the group-life of both white and black, and form an aristocracy,
cultured but pessimistic, whose bitter criticism stings while it points
out no way of escape. They despise the submission and subserviency
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of the Southern Negroes, but offer no other means by 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 which they live, their souls are bitter at the fate which drops
the Veil between; and the very fact that this bitterness is natural and
justifiable only serves to intensify it and make it more maddening.
Between the two extreme types of ethical attitude which I have
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 social conflict within their ranks. Their churches are
differentiating,—now into groups of cold, fashionable devotees, in
no way distinguishable from similar white groups save in color of
skin; now into large social and business institutions catering to the
desire for information and amusement of their members, warily
avoiding unpleasant questions both within and without the black
world, and preaching in effect if not in word: Dum vivimus, vivamus.
But back of this still broods silently the deep religious feeling of
the real Negro heart, the stirring, unguided might of powerful human
souls who have lost the guiding 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 souls shall sweep irresistibly
toward the Goal, out of the Valley of the Shadow of Death, where all
that makes life worth living—Liberty, Justice, and Right—is marked
“For White People Only.”

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XI.
Of the Passing of the First-Born
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 of yellow paper that
fluttered into my room one brown October morning. Then the fear of
fatherhood mingled wildly with the joy of creation; I wondered how
it looked and how it felt—what were its eyes, and how its hair curled
and crumpled itself. And I thought in awe of her,—she who had slept
with Death to tear a man-child from underneath her heart, while I
was unconsciously wandering. I fled to my wife and child, repeating
the while to myself half wonderingly, “Wife and child? Wife and
child?”—fled fast and faster than boat and steam-car, and yet must
ever impatiently await them; away from the hard-voiced city, away
from the flickering sea into my own Berkshire Hills that sit all sadly
guarding the gates of Massachusetts.
Up the stairs I ran to the wan mother and whimpering babe, to the
sanctuary on whose altar a life at my bidding had offered itself to
win a life, and won. What is this tiny formless thing, this newborn
wail from an unknown world,—all head and voice? I handle it
curiously, and watch perplexed its winking, breathing, and sneezing.
I did not love it then; it seemed a ludicrous thing to love; but her I
loved, my girl-mother, she whom now I 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 soul unfolded itself in
twitter and cry and half-formed word, and as its eyes caught the
gleam and flash of life. How beautiful he was, with his olive-tinted
flesh and dark gold ringlets, his eyes of mingled blue and brown, his
perfect little limbs, and the soft voluptuous roll which the blood of
Africa had moulded into his features! I held him in my arms, after we
had sped far away from our Southern home,—held him, and glanced
at the hot red soil of Georgia and the breathless city of a hundred
hills, and felt a vague unrest. Why was his hair tinted with gold? An
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evil omen was golden hair in my life. Why had not the brown of his
eyes crushed out and killed the blue?—for brown were his father’s
eyes, and his father’s father’s. And thus in the Land of the Color-line
I saw, as it fell across my baby, the shadow of the Veil.
Within the Veil was he born, said I; and there within shall 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
dimpled hand—ah, wearily!—to a hope not hopeless but unhopeful,
and seeing with those bright wondering eyes that peer into my soul a
land whose freedom is to us a mockery and whose liberty a lie. I saw
the shadow of the Veil as it passed over my baby, I saw the cold city
towering above the blood-red land. I held my face beside his little
cheek, showed him the star-children and the twinkling lights as they
began to flash, and stilled with an even-song the unvoiced terror of
my life.
So sturdy and masterful he grew, so filled with bubbling life, so
tremulous with the unspoken wisdom of a life but eighteen months
distant from the All-life,—we were not far from worshipping this
revelation of the divine, my wife and I. Her own life builded and
moulded itself upon the child; he tinged her every dream and
idealized her every effort. No hands but hers must touch and garnish
those little limbs; no dress or frill must touch them that had not
wearied her fingers; no voice but hers could coax him off to
Dreamland, and she and he together spoke some soft and unknown
tongue and in it held communion. I too mused above his little white
bed; saw the strength of my own arm stretched onward through the
ages through the newer strength of his; saw the dream of my black
fathers stagger a step onward in the wild phantasm of the world;
heard in his baby voice the voice of the Prophet that was to rise
within the Veil.
And so we dreamed and loved and planned by fall and winter, and
the full flush of the long Southern spring, till the hot winds rolled
from the fetid Gulf, till the roses shivered and the still stern sun
quivered its awful light over the hills of Atlanta. And then one night
the little 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. Ten days he lay there,—a swift week and
three endless days, wasting, wasting away. Cheerily the mother
nursed him the first days, and laughed into the little eyes that smiled
again. Tenderly then she hovered round him, till the smile 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 me
from dull and dreamless trance,—crying, “The Shadow of Death!
The Shadow of Death!” Out into the starlight I crept, to rouse the
gray physician,—the Shadow of Death, the Shadow of Death. The
hours trembled on; the night listened; the ghastly dawn glided like a
tired thing across the lamplight. Then we two alone looked upon the
child as he turned toward us with great eyes, and stretched his
stringlike hands,—the Shadow of Death! And we spoke no word, and
turned away.
He died at eventide, when the sun lay like a brooding sorrow
above the western hills, veiling its face; when the winds spoke not,
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and the trees, the great green trees he loved, stood motionless. I saw
his breath beat quicker and quicker, pause, and then his little soul
leapt like a star that travels in the night and left a world of darkness
in its train. The day changed not; the same tall trees peeped in at the
windows, the same green grass glinted in the setting sun. Only in the
chamber 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 of striving. I am no
coward, to shrink before the rugged rush of the storm, nor even quail
before the awful shadow of the Veil. But hearken, O Death! Is not
this my life hard enough,—is not that dull land that stretches its
sneering web about me cold enough,—is not all the world beyond
these four 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 little coign of happiness that thou
must needs enter there,—thou, O Death?
A perfect life was his, all joy and love, with tears to make it
brighter,—sweet as a summer’s day beside the Housatonic. The
world loved him; the women kissed his curls, the men looked
gravely into his wonderful eyes, and the children hovered and
fluttered about him. I can see him now, changing like the sky from
sparkling laughter to darkening frowns, and then to wondering
thoughtfulness as he watched the world. He knew no color-line, poor
dear—and the Veil, though it shadowed him, had not yet darkened
half his sun. He loved the white matron, he loved his black nurse;
and in his little world walked souls alone, uncolored and unclothed. I
—yea, all men—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 had flown, “He will be happy There; he ever loved
beautiful things.” And I, far more ignorant, and blind by the web of
mine own weaving, sit alone winding words and muttering, “If still
he be, and he be There, and there be a There, let him be happy, O
Fate!”
Blithe was the morning of his burial, with bird and song and
sweet-smelling flowers. The trees whispered to the grass, but the
children sat with hushed faces. And yet it seemed a ghostly unreal
day,—the wraith of Life. We seemed to rumble down an unknown
street behind a little white bundle of posies, with the shadow of a
song in our ears. The busy city dinned about us; they did not say
much, those pale-faced hurrying men and women; they did not say
much,—they only glanced and said, “Niggers!”
We could not lay him in the ground there in Georgia, for the earth
there is strangely red; so we bore him away to the northward, with
his 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 Reverence dwells, and Goodness, and a Freedom that is
free?
All that day and all that night there sat an awful gladness in my
heart,—nay, blame me not if I see the world thus darkly through the
Veil,—and my soul whispers ever to me saying, “Not dead, not dead,
but escaped; not bond, but free.” No bitter meanness now shall
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sicken his baby heart till it die a living death, no taunt shall madden
his happy boyhood. Fool that I was to think or wish that this little
soul should grow choked and deformed within the Veil! I might have
known that yonder deep unworldly look that ever and anon floated
past his eyes was peering far beyond this narrow Now. In the poise of
his little curl-crowned head did there not sit all that wild pride of
being which his father had hardly crushed in his own heart? For
what, forsooth, shall a Negro want with pride amid the studied
humiliations of fifty million fellows? Well sped, my boy, before the
world had dubbed your ambition insolence, had held your ideals
unattainable, and taught you to cringe and bow. Better far this
nameless void that stops my life than a sea of sorrow for you.
Idle words; he might have borne his burden more bravely than we,
—aye, and found it lighter too, some day; for surely, surely this is not
the end. Surely there shall yet dawn some mighty morning to lift the
Veil and set the prisoned free. Not for me,—I shall die in my bonds,
—but for fresh young souls who have not known the night and
waken to the morning; a morning when men ask of the workman, not
“Is he white?” but “Can he work?” When men ask artists, not “Are
they black?” but “Do they know?” Some morning this may be, long,
long years to come. But now there wails, on that dark shore within
the Veil, the same deep voice, Thou shalt forego! And all have I
foregone at that command, and with small complaint,—all save that
fair young form that lies so coldly wed with death in the nest I had
builded.
If one must have gone, why not I? Why may I not rest me from
this restlessness and sleep from this wide waking? Was not the
world’s alembic, Time, in his young hands, and is not my time
waning? Are there so many workers in the vineyard that the fair
promise of this little body could lightly be tossed away? The
wretched of my race that line the alleys of the nation sit fatherless
and unmothered; but Love sat beside his cradle, and in his ear
Wisdom waited to speak. Perhaps now he knows the All-love, and
needs not to be wise. Sleep, then, child,—sleep till I sleep and waken
to a baby voice and the ceaseless patter of little feet—above the Veil.

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XII.
Of Alexander Crummell
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 black boy who

many long years ago began to struggle with life that he might know
the world and know himself. Three temptations he met on those dark
dunes that lay gray 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 darkened noonday; and the temptation of
Doubt, that ever steals along with twilight. Above all, you must hear
of the vales he crossed,—the Valley of Humiliation and the Valley of
the Shadow of Death.
I saw Alexander Crummell first at a Wilberforce commencement
season, amid its bustle and crush. Tall, frail, and black he stood, with
simple dignity and an unmistakable air of good breeding. I talked
with him apart, where the storming of the lusty young orators could
not harm us. I spoke to him politely, then curiously, then eagerly, as I
began to feel the fineness of his character,—his calm courtesy, the
sweetness of his strength, and his fair blending of the hope and truth
of life. Instinctively I bowed before this man, as one bows before the
prophets of the world. Some seer he seemed, that came not from the
crimson Past or the gray To-come, but from the pulsing Now,—that
mocking world which seemed to me at once so light and dark, so
splendid and sordid. Fourscore years had he wandered in this same
world of mine, within the Veil.
He was born with the Missouri Compromise and lay a-dying amid
the echoes of Manila and El Caney: stirring times for living, times
dark to look back upon, darker to look forward to. The black-faced
lad that paused over his mud and marbles seventy years ago saw
puzzling vistas as he looked down the world. The slave-ship still
groaned across the Atlantic, faint cries burdened the Southern breeze,
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and the great black father whispered mad tales of cruelty into those
young ears. From the low doorway the mother silently watched her
boy at play, and at nightfall sought him eagerly lest the shadows bear
him away to the land of slaves.
So his young mind worked and winced and shaped curiously a
vision of Life; and in the midst of that vision ever stood one dark
figure alone,—ever with the hard, thick countenance of that bitter
father, and a form that fell in vast and shapeless folds. Thus the
temptation of Hate grew and shadowed the growing child,—gliding
stealthily into his laughter, fading into his play, and seizing his
dreams by day and night with rough, rude turbulence. So the black
boy asked of sky and sun and flower the never-answered Why? and
loved, as he grew, neither the world nor the world’s rough ways.
Strange temptation for a child, you may think; and yet in this wide
land to-day a thousand thousand dark children brood before this
same temptation, and feel its cold and shuddering arms. For them,
perhaps, some one will some day lift the Veil,—will come tenderly
and cheerily into those sad little lives and brush the brooding hate
away, just as Beriah 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 in Oneida County, New
York, with a score of mischievous boys. “I’m going to bring a black
boy here to educate,” said Beriah Green, as only a crank and an
abolitionist would have dared to say. “Oho!” laughed the boys. “Ye-
es,” said his wife; and Alexander came. Once before, the black boy
had sought a school, had travelled, cold and hungry, four hundred
miles up into free New Hampshire, to Canaan. But the godly farmers
hitched ninety yoke of oxen to the abolition schoolhouse and dragged
it into the middle of the swamp. 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 transfigured
spark of divinity which we call Myself; when clodhoppers and
peasants, and tramps and thieves, and millionaires and—sometimes
—Negroes, became throbbing souls whose warm pulsing life
touched us so nearly that we half gasped with surprise, crying, “Thou
too! Hast Thou seen Sorrow and the dull waters of Hopelessness?
Hast Thou known Life?” And then all helplessly we peered into
those Other-worlds, and wailed, “O World of Worlds, how shall man
make you one?”
So in that little Oneida school there came to those schoolboys a
revelation of thought and longing beneath one black skin, of which
they had not dreamed before. And to the lonely boy came a new
dawn of sympathy and inspiration. The shadowy, formless thing—
the temptation of Hate, 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 the edges. Through it the child
now first saw the blue and gold of life,—the sun-swept road that ran
’twixt heaven and earth until in one far-off wan wavering 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
the fresh new air. Yonder, behind the forests, he heard strange
sounds; then glinting through the trees he saw, far, far away, the
bronzed hosts of a nation calling,—calling faintly, calling loudly. He
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heard the hateful clank of their chains; he felt them cringe and
grovel, and there rose within him a protest and a prophecy. And he
girded himself to walk down the world.
A voice and vision called him to be a priest,—a seer to lead the
uncalled out of the house of bondage. He saw the headless host turn
toward him like the whirling of mad waters,—he stretched forth his
hands eagerly, and then, even as he stretched them, suddenly there
swept across the vision the temptation of Despair.
They were not wicked men,—the problem of life is not the
problem of the wicked,—they were calm, good men, Bishops of the
Apostolic Church of God, and strove toward righteousness. They
said slowly, “It is all very natural—it is even commendable; but the
General Theological Seminary of the Episcopal Church cannot admit
a Negro.” And when that thin, half-grotesque figure still haunted
their doors, they put their hands kindly, half sorrowfully, on his
shoulders, and said, “Now,—of course, we—we know how you feel
about it; but you see it is impossible,—that is—well—it is
premature. Sometime, we trust—sincerely trust—all such
distinctions will fade away; but now the world is as it is.”
This was the temptation of Despair; and the young man fought it
doggedly. Like some grave shadow he flitted by those halls,
pleading, arguing, half angrily demanding admittance, until there
came the final No; until men hustled the disturber away, marked him
as foolish, unreasonable, and injudicious, a vain rebel against God’s
law. And then from that Vision Splendid all the glory faded slowly
away, and left an earth gray and stern rolling on beneath a dark
despair. Even the kind hands that stretched themselves toward him
from out the depths of that dull morning seemed but parts of the
purple shadows. He saw them coldly, and asked, “Why should I
strive by special grace when the way of the world is closed to me?”
All gently yet, the hands urged him on,—the hands of young John
Jay, that daring father’s daring son; the hands of the good folk of
Boston, that free city. And yet, with a way to the priesthood of the
Church open at last before him, the cloud lingered there; and even
when in old St. Paul’s the venerable Bishop raised his white arms
above the Negro deacon—even then the burden had not lifted from
that heart, for there had passed a glory from the earth.
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 he studied the situation. Deep down below the
slavery and servitude of the Negro people he saw their fatal
weaknesses, which long years of mistreatment had emphasized. The
dearth of strong moral character, of unbending righteousness, he felt,
was their great shortcoming, and here he would begin. He would
gather the 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 the world hearkened, till—till—and then across his
dream gleamed some faint after-glow of that first fair vision of youth
—only an after-glow, for there had passed a glory from the earth.
One day—it was in 1842, and the springtide was struggling
merrily with the May winds of New England—he stood at last in his
own chapel in Providence, a priest of the Church. The days sped by,
and the dark young clergyman labored; he wrote his sermons
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carefully; he intoned his prayers with a soft, earnest voice; he

haunted the streets and accosted the wayfarers; he visited the sick,
and knelt beside the dying. He worked and toiled, week by week, day
by day, month by month. And yet month by month the congregation
dwindled, week by week the hollow walls echoed more sharply, day
by day the calls came fewer and fewer, and day by day the third
temptation sat clearer and still more clearly within the Veil; a
temptation, as it were, bland and smiling, with just a shade of
mockery in its smooth tones. First it came casually, in the cadence of
a voice: “Oh, colored folks? Yes.” Or perhaps more definitely: “What
do you expect?” In voice and gesture lay the doubt—the temptation
of Doubt. How he hated it, and stormed at it furiously! “Of course
they are capable,” he cried; “of course they can learn and strive and
achieve—” and “Of course,” added the temptation softly, “they do
nothing of the sort.” Of all the three temptations, this one struck the
deepest. Hate? He had outgrown so childish a thing. Despair? He had
steeled his right arm against it, and fought it with the vigor of
determination. But to doubt the worth of his life-work,—to doubt the
destiny and capability of the race his soul loved because it was his; to
find listless squalor instead of eager endeavor; to hear his own lips
whispering, “They do not care; they cannot know; they are dumb
driven cattle,—why cast your pearls before swine?”—this, this
seemed more than man could bear; and he closed the door, and sank
upon the steps of the chancel, and cast his robe upon the floor and
writhed.
The evening sunbeams had set the dust to dancing in the gloomy
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 upon the narrow little pulpit with a weary smile, and
locked the door. Then he walked briskly to the Bishop, and told the
Bishop what the Bishop already knew. “I have failed,” he said
simply. And gaining courage by the confession, he added: “What I
need is a larger constituency. There are comparatively few Negroes
here, and perhaps they are not of the best. I must go where the field is
wider, and try again.” So the Bishop sent him to Philadelphia, 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
Apostolic Succession. It was after dinner, and the Bishop had settled
himself for a pleasant season of contemplation, when the bell must
needs ring, and there must burst in upon the Bishop a letter and a
thin, ungainly Negro. Bishop Onderdonk read the letter hastily and
frowned. Fortunately, his mind was already clear on this point; and
he cleared his brow and looked at Crummell. Then he said, slowly
and impressively: “I will receive you into this diocese on one
condition: no Negro priest can sit in my church convention, and no
Negro church must ask for representation there.”
I sometimes fancy I can see that tableau: the frail black figure,
nervously twitching his hat before the massive abdomen of Bishop
Onderdonk; his threadbare coat thrown against the dark woodwork
of the bookcases, where Fox’s “Lives of the Martyrs” nestled happily
beside “The Whole Duty of Man.” I seem to see the wide eyes of the
Negro wander past the Bishop’s broadcloth to where the swinging

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glass doors of the cabinet glow in the sunlight. A little blue fly is
trying to cross the yawning keyhole. He marches briskly up to it,
peers into the chasm in a surprised sort of way, and rubs his feelers
reflectively; then he essays its depths, and, finding it bottomless,
draws back again. The dark-faced priest finds himself wondering if
the fly too has faced its Valley of Humiliation, and if it will plunge
into it,—when lo! it spreads its tiny wings and buzzes merrily across,
leaving the watcher wingless and alone.
Then the full weight of his burden fell upon him. The rich walls
wheeled away, and before him lay the cold rough moor winding on
through life, cut in twain by one thick granite ridge,—here, the
Valley of Humiliation; yonder, the Valley of the Shadow of Death.
And I know not which be darker,—no, not I. But this I know: in
yonder Vale of the Humble stand to-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 that this were
sacrifice and not a meaner thing. So surged the thought within that
lone 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 and heavily: “I will never enter your diocese
on such terms.” And saying this, he turned and passed into the Valley
of the Shadow of Death. You might have noted only the physical
dying, the shattered frame and hacking cough; but in that soul lay
deeper death than that. He found a chapel in New York,—the church
of his father; he labored for it in poverty and starvation, scorned by
his fellow priests. Half in despair, he wandered across the sea, a
beggar with outstretched hands. Englishmen clasped them,—
Wilberforce and Stanley, Thirwell and Ingles, and even Froude and
Macaulay; Sir Benjamin Brodie bade him rest awhile at Queen’s
College in Cambridge, and there he lingered, struggling for 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 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,—it was the
world-wandering of a soul in search of itself, the striving of one who
vainly sought his place in the world, ever haunted by the shadow of a
death that 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 rasping question kept gnawing within him, “What, in
God’s name, am I on earth for?” 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 wailing over the sea. In the
wild fever-cursed swamps of West Africa he stood helpless and
alone.
You will not wonder at his weird pilgrimage,—you who in the
swift whirl of living, amid its cold paradox and marvellous vision,
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have fronted life and asked its riddle face to face. And if you find that
riddle hard to read, remember that yonder black boy finds it just a
little harder; if it is difficult for you to find and face your duty, it is a
shade more difficult for him; if your heart sickens in the blood and
dust of battle, remember that to him the dust is thicker and the battle
fiercer. No wonder the wanderers fall! No wonder we point to thief
and murderer, and haunting prostitute, and the never-ending throng
of unhearsed dead! The Valley of the Shadow of Death gives few of
its pilgrims back to the world.
But Alexander Crummell it gave back. Out of the temptation of
Hate, and burned by the fire of Despair, triumphant over Doubt, and
steeled by Sacrifice against Humiliation, he turned at last home
across the waters, humble and strong, gentle and determined. He bent
to all the gibes and prejudices, to all hatred and discrimination, with
that rare courtesy which is the armor of pure souls. He fought among
his own, the low, the grasping, and the 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 all that was best
of those who walk within the Veil. They who live without knew not
nor dreamed of that full power within, that mighty inspiration which
the dull gauze of caste decreed that most men should not know. And
now that he is gone, I sweep the Veil away and cry, Lo! the soul to
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 with inspiration for the future, now in innocent pain at some
human wickedness, now with sorrow at some hard memory from the
past. The more I met Alexander Crummell, the more I felt how much
that world was losing which knew so little of him. In another age he
might have sat among the elders of the land in purple-bordered toga;
in another country mothers might have sung him to the cradles.
He did his work,—he did it nobly and well; and yet I sorrow that
here he worked alone, with so little human sympathy. His name to-
day, in this broad land, means little, and comes to fifty million ears
laden with 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 are wicked,—who is good? not that men are
ignorant,—what is Truth? Nay, but that men know so little of men.

He sat one morning gazing toward the sea. He smiled and said,
“The gate is rusty on the hinges.” That night at star-rise a wind came
moaning out of the west to blow the gate ajar, and then the soul I
loved 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 dim world
beyond, as he came gliding in, there rose on some wan throne a
King,—a dark and pierced Jew, who knows the writhings of the
earthly damned, saying, as he laid those heart-wrung talents down,
“Well done!” while round about the morning stars sat singing.

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XIII.
Of the Coming of John
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 of Johnstown, across

a great black bridge, down a hill and up again, by little shops and
meat-markets, past single-storied homes, until suddenly it stops
against a wide green lawn. It is a broad, restful place, with two large
buildings outlined against the west. When at evening the winds come
swelling from the east, and the great pall of the city’s smoke hangs
wearily above the valley, then the red west glows like a dreamland
down Carlisle Street, and, at the tolling of the supper-bell, throws the
passing forms of students in dark silhouette against the sky. Tall and
black, they move slowly by, and seem in the sinister light to flit
before the city like dim warning ghosts. Perhaps they are; for this is
Wells Institute, and these black students have few dealings with the
white city below.
And if you will notice, night after night, there is one dark form
that ever hurries last and late toward the twinkling lights of Swain
Hall,—for Jones is never on time. A long, straggling fellow he is,
brown and hard-haired, who seems to be growing straight out of his
clothes, and walks with a half-apologetic roll. He used perpetually to
set the quiet dining-room into waves of merriment, as he stole to his
place after the bell had tapped for prayers; he seemed so perfectly
awkward. And yet one glance at his face made one forgive him
much,—that broad, good-natured smile in which lay no bit of art or

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artifice, but seemed just bubbling good-nature and genuine

satisfaction with the world.
He came to us from Altamaha, away down there beneath the
gnarled oaks of Southeastern Georgia, where the sea croons to the
sands and the sands listen till they sink half drowned beneath the
waters, rising only here and there in long, low islands. The white folk
of Altamaha voted John a good boy,—fine plough-hand, good in the
rice-fields, handy everywhere, and always good-natured and
respectful. But they shook their heads when his mother wanted to
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
him proudly 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 the boys clapped him on the back. So the train came,
and he pinched his little sister lovingly, and put his great arms about
his mother’s neck, and then was away with a puff and a roar into the
great yellow world that flamed and flared about the doubtful pilgrim.
Up the coast they hurried, past the squares and palmettos of
Savannah, through the cotton-fields and through the weary night, to
Millville, and came with the morning to the noise and bustle of
Johnstown.
And they that stood behind, that morning in Altamaha, and
watched the train as it noisily bore playmate and brother and son
away to the world, had thereafter one ever-recurring word,—“When
John comes.” Then what parties were to be, and what speakings in
the churches; what new furniture in the front room,—perhaps even a
new front room; and there would be a new schoolhouse, with John as
teacher; and then perhaps a big wedding; all this and more—when
John comes. But the white people shook their heads.
At first he was coming at Christmas-time,—but the vacation
proved too short; and then, the next summer,—but times were hard
and schooling costly, and so, instead, he worked in Johnstown. And
so it drifted to the next summer, and the next,—till playmates
scattered, and mother grew gray, and sister went up to the Judge’s
kitchen to work. And still the legend lingered,—“When John comes.”
Up at the Judge’s they rather liked this refrain; for they too had a
John—a fair-haired, smooth-faced boy, who had played many a long
summer’s day to its close with his darker namesake. “Yes, sir! John
is at Princeton, sir,” said the broad-shouldered gray-haired Judge
every morning as he marched down to the post-office. “Showing the
Yankees what a Southern gentleman can do,” he added; and strode
home again with his letters and papers. Up at the great pillared house
they lingered long over the Princeton letter,—the Judge and his frail
wife, his sister and growing daughters. “It’ll make a man of him,”
said the Judge, “college is the place.” And then he asked the shy little
waitress, “Well, Jennie, how’s your John?” and added reflectively,
“Too bad, too bad your mother sent him off—it will spoil him.” And
the waitress wondered.
Thus in the far-away Southern village the world lay waiting, half
consciously, the coming of two young men, and dreamed in an
inarticulate way of new things that would be done and new thoughts
that all would think. And yet it was singular that few thought of two
Johns,—for the black folk thought of one John, and he was black;
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and the white folk thought of another John, and he was white. And
neither world thought the other world’s thought, save with a vague
unrest.
Up in Johnstown, at the Institute, we were long puzzled at the case
of John Jones. For a long time the clay seemed unfit for any sort of
moulding. He was loud and boisterous, always laughing and singing,
and never able to work consecutively at anything. He did not know
how to study; he had no idea of thoroughness; and with his tardiness,
carelessness, and appalling good-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 too much, and so we
solemnly voted “that Jones, on account of repeated disorder and
inattention to work, be suspended for the rest of the term.”
It seemed to us that the first time life ever struck Jones as a really
serious thing was when the Dean told him he must leave school. He
stared at the gray-haired man blankly, with great eyes. “Why,—why,”
he faltered, “but—I haven’t graduated!” Then the Dean slowly and
clearly explained, reminding him of the tardiness and the
carelessness, of the poor lessons and neglected work, of the noise
and disorder, 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 will you? For if you won’t I’ll go out into the
city and work, and come back next term and show you something.”
So the Dean promised faithfully, and John shouldered 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 set and serious
face.
Perhaps we imagined it, but someway it seemed to us that the
serious look that crept over his boyish face that afternoon never left it
again. When he came back to us he went to work with all his rugged
strength. It was a hard struggle, for things did not come easily to
him,—few crowding memories of early life and teaching came to
help him on his new way; but all the world toward which he strove
was of his own building, and he builded slow and hard. As the light
dawned lingeringly on his new creations, he sat rapt and silent before
the vision, or wandered alone over the green campus peering through
and beyond the world of men into a world of thought. And the
thoughts at times puzzled him sorely; he could not see just why the
circle was not square, and carried it out fifty-six decimal places one
midnight,—would have gone further, indeed, had not the matron
rapped for lights out. He caught terrible colds lying on his back in the
meadows of nights, trying to think out the solar system; he had grave
doubts as to the ethics of the Fall of Rome, and strongly suspected
the Germans of being thieves and rascals, despite his textbooks; he
pondered long over every new Greek word, and wondered why this
meant that and why it couldn’t mean something else, and how it must
have felt to think all things in Greek. So he thought and puzzled
along for himself,—pausing perplexed where others skipped merrily,
and walking steadily through the difficulties where the rest stopped
and surrendered.
Thus he grew in body and soul, and with him his clothes seemed
to grow and arrange themselves; coat sleeves got longer, cuffs
appeared, and collars got less soiled. Now and then his boots shone,
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and a new dignity crept into his walk. And we who saw daily a new
thoughtfulness growing in his eyes began to expect something of this
plodding boy. Thus he passed out of the preparatory school into
college, and we who watched him felt four more years of change,
which almost transformed the tall, grave man who bowed to us
commencement morning. He had left his queer thought-world and
come back to a world 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 for the first time the Veil that
lay between him and the white world; he first noticed now the
oppression that had not seemed oppression before, differences that
erstwhile seemed natural, restraints and slights that in his boyhood
days had gone unnoticed or been greeted with a laugh. He felt angry
now when men did not call him “Mister,” he clenched his hands at
the “Jim Crow” cars, and chafed at the color-line that hemmed in
him and his. A tinge 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 native town. And yet he
always planned to go back to Altamaha,—always planned to work
there. Still, more and more as the day approached he hesitated with a
nameless dread; and even the day after graduation he seized with
eagerness the offer of the Dean to send him North 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 of New York
were brilliant with moving men. They reminded John of the sea, as
he sat in the square and watched them, so changelessly changing, so
bright and dark, so grave and gay. He scanned their rich and faultless
clothes, the way they carried their hands, the shape of their hats; he
peered into the hurrying carriages. Then, leaning back with a sigh, he
said, “This is the World.” 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 a tall, light-haired young man
and a little talkative lady came by, he rose half hesitatingly and
followed them. Up the street they went, past stores and gay shops,
across a broad square, until with a hundred others they entered the
high portal 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. There seemed
really no time for hesitation, so he drew it bravely out, passed it to
the busy clerk, and received simply a ticket but no change. When at
last he realized that he had paid five dollars to enter he knew not
what, he stood stockstill amazed. “Be careful,” said a low voice
behind him; “you must not lynch the colored gentleman simply
because he’s in your way,” and a girl looked up roguishly into the
eyes of her fair-haired escort. A shade of annoyance passed over the
escort’s face. “You will not understand us at the South,” he said half
impatiently, as if continuing an argument. “With all your professions,
one never sees in the North so cordial and intimate relations between
white and black as are everyday occurrences with us. Why, I
remember my closest playfellow in boyhood was a little Negro
named after me, and surely no two,—well!” The man stopped short
and flushed to the roots of his hair, for there directly beside his
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reserved orchestra chairs sat the Negro he had stumbled over in the
hallway. He 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 the subject.
All this John did not see, for he sat in a half-daze minding the
scene about him; the delicate beauty of the hall, the faint perfume,
the moving myriad of men, the rich clothing and low hum of talking
seemed all a part of a world so different from his, so strangely more
beautiful than anything he had known, that he sat in dreamland, and
started when, after a hush, rose high and clear the music of
Lohengrin’s swan. The infinite beauty of the wail lingered and swept
through every muscle of his frame, and put it all a-tune. He closed
his eyes and grasped the elbows of the chair, touching unwittingly
the lady’s arm. And the lady drew away. A deep longing swelled in
all his heart to rise with that clear music out of the dirt and dust of
that low life that held him prisoned and befouled. If he could only
live up in the free air where birds sang and setting suns had no touch
of blood! Who had called him to be the slave and butt of all? And if
he had called, what right had he to call when a world like this lay
open before men?
Then the movement changed, and fuller, mightier harmony
swelled away. He looked thoughtfully across the hall, and wondered
why the beautiful gray-haired woman looked so listless, and what the
little man could be whispering about. He would not like to be listless
and idle, he thought, for he felt with the music the movement of
power within him. If he but had some master-work, some life-
service, hard,—aye, bitter hard, but without the cringing and
sickening servility, without the cruel hurt that hardened his heart and
soul. When at last a soft sorrow crept across the violins, there came
to him the vision of a far-off home, the great eyes of his sister, and
the dark drawn face of his mother. And his heart sank below the
waters, even as the sea-sand sinks by the shores of Altamaha, only to
be lifted aloft again with that 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 not for some time
notice the usher tapping him lightly on the shoulder and saying
politely, “Will you step this way, please, sir?” A little surprised, he
arose quickly at the last tap, and, turning to leave his seat, looked full
into the face of the fair-haired young man. For the first time the
young man recognized his dark boyhood playmate, 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 in selling the gentleman a seat already disposed of; he
would refund the money, of course,—and indeed felt the matter
keenly, and so forth, and—before he had finished John was gone,
walking hurriedly across the square and down the broad 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 his lodgings and wrote a
letter, and tore it up; he wrote another, and threw it in the fire. Then
he seized a scrap of paper and wrote: “Dear Mother and Sister—I am
coming—John.”

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“Perhaps,” said John, as he settled himself on the train, “perhaps I

am to blame myself in struggling against my manifest destiny simply
because it looks hard and unpleasant. Here is my duty to Altamaha
plain before me; perhaps they’ll let me help settle the Negro
problems there,—perhaps they won’t. ‘I will go in to the King, which
is not according to 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 world knew
John was coming. The homes were scrubbed and scoured,—above
all, one; the gardens and yards had an unwonted trimness, and Jennie
bought a new gingham. With some finesse and negotiation, all the
dark Methodists and Presbyterians 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 the exact extent and nature of
John’s accomplishments. It was noontide on a gray and cloudy day
when he came. The black town flocked to the depot, with a little of
the white at the edges,—a happy throng, with “Good-mawnings” and
“Howdys” and laughing and joking and jostling. Mother sat yonder
in the window watching; but sister Jennie stood on the platform,
nervously fingering her dress, tall and lithe, with soft brown skin and
loving eyes peering from out a tangled wilderness of hair. John rose
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
black crowd gaudy and dirty, a half-mile of dilapidated shanties
along a straggling ditch of mud. An overwhelming sense of the
sordidness and narrowness of it all seized him; he looked in vain for
his mother, kissed coldly the tall, strange girl who called him brother,
spoke a short, dry word here and there; then, lingering neither for
handshaking nor gossip, started silently up the street, raising his hat
merely to the last eager old aunty, to her open-mouthed
astonishment. 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. “Seemed monstus stuck up,” complained a
Baptist sister. But the white postmaster from the edge of the crowd
expressed the opinion of his folks plainly. “That damn Nigger,” said
he, as he shouldered the mail and arranged his tobacco, “has gone
North and got plum full o’ fool notions; but they won’t work in
Altamaha.” And the crowd melted away.
The meeting of welcome at the Baptist Church was a failure. Rain
spoiled the barbecue, and thunder turned the milk in the ice-cream.
When the speaking came at night, the house was crowded to
overflowing. The three preachers had especially prepared
themselves, but somehow John’s manner seemed to throw a blanket
over everything,—he seemed so cold and preoccupied, and had so
strange an air of restraint that the Methodist brother could not warm
up to his theme and elicited not a single “Amen”; the Presbyterian
prayer was but feebly responded to, and even the Baptist preacher,
though he wakened faint enthusiasm, got so mixed up in his favorite
sentence that he had to close it by stopping fully fifteen minutes
sooner than he meant. The people moved uneasily in their seats as
John rose to reply. He spoke slowly and methodically. The age, he
said, demanded new ideas; we were far different from those men of
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the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,—with broader ideas of

human brotherhood and destiny. Then he spoke of the rise of charity
and popular education, and particularly of the spread of wealth and
work. The question was, then, he added reflectively, looking at the
low discolored ceiling, what part the Negroes of this land would take
in the striving of the new century. He sketched in vague outline the
new Industrial School that might rise among these pines, he spoke in
detail of the charitable and philanthropic work that might be
organized, of money that might be saved for banks and business.
Finally he urged unity, and deprecated especially religious and
denominational bickering. “To-day,” he said, with a smile, “the
world cares little whether a man be Baptist or Methodist, or indeed a
churchman at all, so long as he is good and true. What difference
does it make whether a man be baptized in river or washbowl, or not
at all? Let’s leave all that littleness, and look higher.” Then, thinking
of 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 unknown tongue, save the last word about baptism; that
they knew, and they sat very still while the clock ticked. Then at last
a low suppressed snarl came from the Amen corner, and an old bent
man arose, walked over the seats, and climbed straight up 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 rapt look 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 rude and awful eloquence. He quivered,
swayed, and bent; then rose aloft in perfect majesty, till the people
moaned and wept, wailed and shouted, and a wild shrieking arose
from the corners where all the pent-up feeling of the hour gathered
itself and rushed into the air. John never knew clearly what the old
man said; he only felt himself held up to scorn and scathing
denunciation for trampling on the true Religion, and he realized with
amazement that all unknowingly 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 after him.
When at last he stood upon the bluff, he turned to his little sister and
looked upon her sorrowfully, remembering with sudden pain how
little thought he had given her. He put his arm about her and let her
passion of tears spend itself on his shoulder.
Long they stood together, peering over the gray unresting water.
“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,” he said.
“And, John, are you glad you studied?”
“Yes,” came the answer, slowly but positively.
She watched the flickering lights upon the sea, and said
thoughtfully, “I wish I was unhappy,—and—and,” putting both arms
about his neck, “I think I am, a little, John.”
It was several days later that John walked up to the Judge’s house
to ask for the privilege of teaching the Negro school. The Judge
himself met him at the front door, stared a little hard at him, and said

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brusquely, “Go ’round to the kitchen door, John, and wait.” Sitting
on the kitchen steps, John stared at the corn, thoroughly perplexed.
What on earth had come over him? Every step he made offended
some one. He had come to save his people, and before he left the
depot he had hurt them. He sought to teach them at the church, and
had outraged their deepest feelings. He had schooled himself to be
respectful to the Judge, and then blundered into his front door. And
all the time he had meant right,—and yet, and yet, somehow he
found it so hard and strange to fit his old surroundings again, to find
his place in the world about him. He could not remember that he
used to have any difficulty in the past, when life was glad and gay.
The world seemed smooth and easy then. Perhaps,—but his sister
came to the kitchen door just then and said 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 you plainly. 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 like the colored people, and sympathize
with all their reasonable aspirations; but you and I both know, John,
that in this country the Negro must remain subordinate, and can
never expect to be the equal of white men. In their place, your people
can be honest and respectful; and God knows, I’ll do what I can to
help them. But when they want to reverse nature, and rule white
men, and marry white women, and sit in my parlor, then, by God!
we’ll hold them under if we have 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 and teach 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 fool ideas of rising and equality into these folks’ heads, and
make them discontented and unhappy?”
“I am going to accept the situation, Judge Henderson,” answered
John, with a brevity that did not escape the keen old man. He
hesitated a moment, and then said shortly, “Very well,—we’ll try you
awhile. Good-morning.”
It was a full month after the opening of the Negro school that the
other John came home, tall, gay, and headstrong. The mother wept,
the sisters sang. The whole white town was glad. A proud man was
the Judge, and it was a goodly sight to see the two swinging down
Main Street together. And yet all did not go smoothly between them,
for the younger man could not and did not veil his contempt for the
little town, and plainly had his heart set on New York. Now the one
cherished ambition of the Judge was to see his son mayor of
Altamaha, representative to the legislature, and—who could say?—
governor of Georgia. So the argument often waxed hot between
them. “Good heavens, father,” the younger man would say after
dinner, as he lighted a cigar and stood by the fireplace, “you surely
don’t expect a young fellow like me to settle down permanently in
this—this God-forgotten town with nothing but mud and Negroes?”
“I did,” the Judge would answer laconically; and on this particular
day it seemed from the gathering scowl that he was about to add

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something more emphatic, but neighbors had already begun to drop

in to admire his son, and the conversation drifted.
“Heah that John is livenin’ things up at the darky school,”
volunteered the postmaster, after a pause.
“What now?” asked the Judge, sharply.
“Oh, nothin’ in particulah,—just his almighty air and uppish ways.
B’lieve I did heah somethin’ about his givin’ talks on the French
Revolution, equality, and such like. He’s what I call a dangerous
Nigger.”
“Have you heard him say anything out of the way?”
“Why, no,—but Sally, our girl, told my wife a lot of rot. Then, too,
I don’t need to heah: a Nigger what won’t say ‘sir’ to a white man, or
—”
“Who is this John?” interrupted the son.
“Why, it’s little black John, Peggy’s son,—your old playfellow.”
The young man’s face flushed angrily, and then he laughed.
“Oh,” said he, “it’s the darky that tried to force himself into a seat
beside the lady I was escorting—”
But Judge Henderson waited to hear no more. He had been nettled
all day, and now at this he rose with a half-smothered oath, took his
hat and cane, and walked straight to the schoolhouse.
For John, it had been a long, hard pull to get things started in the
rickety old shanty that sheltered his school. The Negroes were rent
into factions for and against him, the parents were careless, the
children irregular and dirty, and books, pencils, and slates largely
missing. Nevertheless, he struggled hopefully on, and seemed to see
at last some glimmering of dawn. The attendance was larger and the
children were a shade cleaner this week. Even the booby class in
reading showed a little comforting progress. So John settled himself
with renewed patience this afternoon.
“Now, Mandy,” he said cheerfully, “that’s better; 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 teacher half arose, as
the red, angry face of the Judge appeared in the open doorway.
“John, this school is closed. You children can go home and get to
work. The white people of Altamaha are not spending their money on
black folks to have their heads crammed with impudence and lies.
Clear out! I’ll lock the door myself.”
Up at the great pillared house the tall young son wandered
aimlessly about after his father’s abrupt departure. In the house there
was little to interest him; the books were old and stale, the local
newspaper flat, and the women had retired with headaches and
sewing. He tried a nap, but it was too warm. So he sauntered out into
the fields, complaining disconsolately, “Good Lord! how long will
this imprisonment last!” He was not a bad fellow,—just a little
spoiled and self-indulgent, and as headstrong as his proud father. He
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seemed a young man pleasant to look upon, as he sat on the great

black stump at the edge of the pines idly swinging his legs and
smoking. “Why, there isn’t even a girl worth getting up a respectable
flirtation with,” he growled. Just then his eye caught a tall, willowy
figure hurrying toward him on the narrow path. He looked with
interest at first, and then burst into a laugh as he said, “Well, I
declare, if it isn’t Jennie, the little brown kitchen-maid! Why, I never
noticed before what a trim little body she is. Hello, Jennie! Why, you
haven’t kissed me since I came home,” he said gaily. The young girl
stared at him in surprise and confusion,—faltered something
inarticulate, and attempted to pass. But a wilful 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 the tall
pines.
Yonder, toward the sea, at the end of the path, came John slowly,
with his head down. He had turned wearily homeward from the
schoolhouse; then, thinking to shield his mother from the blow,
started to meet his 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, and send for them. I cannot live here longer.” And
then the fierce, buried anger surged up into his throat. He waved his
arms and hurried wildly up the path.
The great brown sea lay silent. The air scarce breathed. The dying
day bathed the twisted oaks and mighty pines in black and gold.
There came from the wind no warning, not a whisper from the
cloudless sky. There was only a black man hurrying on with an ache
in his heart, seeing neither sun nor sea, but starting as from a dream
at the frightened cry that woke the pines, to see his dark sister
struggling in the arms of a tall and fair-haired man.
He said not a word, but, seizing a fallen limb, struck him with all
the pent-up hatred of his great black arm, and the body lay white and
still beneath the pines, all bathed in sunshine and in blood. John
looked at it dreamily, then walked back to the house briskly, and said
in a soft voice, “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 above the
waters, and said, “Yes, mammy, I’m going—North.”
Then, without another word, he went out into the narrow lane, up
by the straight pines, to the same winding path, and seated himself
on the great black stump, looking at the blood where the body had
lain. Yonder in the gray past he had played with that dead boy,
romping together under the solemn trees. The night deepened; he
thought of the boys at Johnstown. He wondered how Brown had
turned out, and Carey? And Jones,—Jones? Why, he was Jones, 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 the sheen of the starlight stole over him, he thought of the
gilded ceiling of that vast 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 and high the faint sweet melody
rose and fluttered like a living thing, so that the very earth trembled
as with the tramp of horses and murmur of angry men.
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He leaned back and smiled toward the sea, whence rose the
strange melody, away from the dark shadows where lay the noise of
horses galloping, galloping on. With an effort he roused himself, bent
forward, and looked steadily down the pathway, softly humming the
“Song of the Bride,”—
“Freudig geführt, ziehet dahin.”

Amid the trees in the dim morning twilight he watched their

shadows dancing and heard their horses thundering toward him, until
at last they came sweeping like a storm, and he saw in front that
haggard white-haired man, whose eyes flashed red with fury. Oh,
how he pitied him,—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 closed eyes toward the Sea.
And the world whistled in his ears.

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XIV.
Of the Sorrow Songs
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
thought that I have written in this book I have set a phrase, a
haunting echo of these weird old songs in which the soul of the black
slave spoke to men. Ever since I was a child these songs have stirred
me strangely. They came out of the South unknown 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 of
these songs towering over the pale city. To me Jubilee Hall seemed
ever made of the songs themselves, and its bricks were red with 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, full of the voices of the past.
Little of beauty has America given the world save the rude
grandeur God himself stamped on her bosom; the human spirit in this
new world has expressed itself in vigor and ingenuity rather than in
beauty. And so by 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 beautiful expression 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 persistently mistaken and
misunderstood; but notwithstanding, it still remains as the singular
spiritual heritage of the nation and the greatest gift of the Negro
people.
Away back in the thirties the melody of these slave songs stirred
the nation, but the songs were soon half forgotten. Some, like “Near
the lake where drooped the willow,” passed into current airs and their

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source was forgotten; others were caricatured on the “minstrel” stage

and their memory died away. Then in war-time came the singular
Port Royal experiment after the capture of Hilton Head, and perhaps
for the first time the North met the Southern slave face to face and
heart to heart with no third witness. The Sea Islands of the Carolinas,
where they met, were filled with a black folk of primitive type,
touched and moulded less by the world about them than any others
outside the Black Belt. Their appearance was uncouth, their language
funny, but their hearts were human and their singing stirred men with
a mighty power. Thomas Wentworth Higginson hastened to tell of
these songs, and Miss McKim and others urged upon the world their
rare beauty. But the world listened only half credulously until the
Fisk Jubilee Singers sang the slave songs so deeply into the world’s
heart that it can never wholly forget them again.
There was once a blacksmith’s son born at Cadiz, New York, who
in the changes of time taught school in Ohio and helped defend
Cincinnati from Kirby Smith. Then he fought at Chancellorsville and
Gettysburg and finally served in the Freedmen’s Bureau at Nashville.
Here he formed a Sunday-school class of black children in 1866, and
sang with them and taught them to sing. And then they taught him to
sing, and when once the glory of the Jubilee songs passed into the
soul of George L. White, he knew his life-work was to let those
Negroes sing to the world as they had sung to him. So in 1871 the
pilgrimage 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 cause and a purpose. They stopped at Wilberforce,
the oldest of Negro schools, where a black bishop blessed them.
Then they went, fighting cold and starvation, shut out of hotels, and
cheerfully sneered at, ever northward; and ever the magic of their
song kept thrilling hearts, until a burst of applause in the
Congregational Council at Oberlin revealed them to the world. They
came to New York and Henry Ward Beecher dared to welcome them,
even though the metropolitan dailies sneered at his “Nigger
Minstrels.” So their songs conquered till they sang across the land
and across the sea, before Queen and Kaiser, in Scotland and Ireland,
Holland and Switzerland. Seven years they sang, and brought back a
hundred and fifty thousand dollars to found Fisk University.
Since their day they have been imitated—sometimes well, by the
singers of Hampton and Atlanta, sometimes ill, by straggling
quartettes. Caricature has sought again to spoil the quaint beauty of
the music, and has filled the air with many debased melodies which
vulgar ears scarce know from the real. But the true Negro folk-song
still lives in the hearts of those who have heard them truly sung and
in the hearts of the Negro people.
What are these songs, and what do they mean? I know little of
music and can say nothing in technical phrase, but I know something
of men, and knowing them, I know that these songs are the articulate
message of the slave to the world. They tell us in these eager days
that life was joyous to the black slave, careless and happy. I can
easily believe this of some, of many. But not all the past South,
though it rose from the dead, can gainsay the heart-touching witness
of these songs. They are the music of an unhappy people, of the
children of disappointment; they tell of death and suffering and

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unvoiced longing toward a truer world, of misty wanderings and

hidden ways.
The songs are indeed the siftings of centuries; the music is far
more ancient than the words, and in it we can trace here and there
signs of development. My grandfather’s grandmother was seized by
an evil Dutch trader two centuries ago; and coming to the valleys of
the Hudson and Housatonic, black, little, and lithe, she shivered and
shrank in the harsh north winds, looked longingly at the hills, and
often crooned a heathen melody to the child between her knees, thus:

The child sang it to his children and they to their children’s

children, and so two hundred years it has travelled down to us and
we sing it to our children, knowing as little as our fathers what its
words may mean, but knowing well the meaning of its music.
This was primitive African music; it may be seen in larger 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,”

—the voice of exile.

Ten master songs, more or less, one may pluck from the forest of
melody-songs of undoubted Negro origin and wide popular currency,
and songs peculiarly characteristic of the slave. One of these I have
just mentioned. Another whose strains begin this book is “Nobody
knows the trouble I’ve seen.” When, struck with a sudden poverty,
the United States refused to fulfill its promises of land to the
freedmen, a brigadier-general went down to the Sea Islands to carry
the news. An old woman on the outskirts of 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 men know,
—“Swing low, sweet chariot,”—whose bars begin the life story of
“Alexander Crummell.” Then there is the song of many waters,
“Roll, Jordan, roll,” a mighty chorus with minor cadences. There
were many songs of the fugitive like that which opens “The Wings of
Atalanta,” and the more familiar “Been a-listening.” The seventh is
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
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before “The Dawn of Freedom.” The song of groping—“My way’s

cloudy”—begins “The Meaning of Progress”; the ninth is the song of
this chapter—“Wrestlin’ Jacob, the day is a-breaking,”—a paean of
hopeful strife. The last master song is the song of songs—“Steal
away,”—sprung from “The Faith of the Fathers.”
There are many others of the Negro folk-songs as striking and
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
selection on more scientific principles. There are, too, songs that
seem to be a step removed from the more primitive types: there is the
maze-like medley, “Bright sparkles,” one phrase of which heads
“The Black Belt”; the Easter carol, “Dust, dust and ashes”; the dirge,
“My mother’s took her flight and gone home”; and that burst of
melody hovering over “The Passing of the First-Born”—“I hope my
mother will be there in that beautiful world on high.”
These represent a third step in the development of the slave song,
of which “You may bury me in the East” is the first, and songs like
“March on” (chapter six) and “Steal away” are the second. The first
is African music, the second Afro-American, while the 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 a fourth step in this development, where the songs of white
America have been distinctively influenced by the slave songs or
have incorporated whole phrases of 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, and some of the contemporary “coon”
songs,—a mass of music in which the novice may easily lose himself
and never find the real Negro melodies.
In these songs, I have said, the slave spoke to the world. Such a
message is naturally veiled and half articulate. Words and music have
lost each other and new and cant phrases of a dimly understood
theology have displaced the older sentiment. Once in a while we
catch a strange word of an unknown tongue, as the “Mighty Myo,”
which figures as a river of death; more often slight words or mere
doggerel are joined to music of singular sweetness. Purely secular
songs are few in number, partly because many of them were turned
into hymns by a change of words, partly because the frolics were
seldom heard by the stranger, and the music less often caught. Of
nearly all the songs, however, the music is distinctly sorrowful. The
ten master songs I have mentioned tell in word and music of trouble
and exile, of strife and hiding; 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 meaning
beneath conventional theology and unmeaning rhapsody. Like all
primitive folk, the slave stood near to Nature’s heart. Life was a
“rough and rolling sea” 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 of
life and death to a tropical imagination. The sudden wild

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thunderstorms of the South awed and impressed the Negroes,—at

times the rumbling seemed 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-repeated wail:
“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 the savage, the wail
of the wanderer, and the plaint is put in one little phrase:

Over the inner thoughts of the slaves and their relations one with
another the shadow of fear ever hung, so that we get but glimpses
here and there, and also with them, eloquent omissions and silences.
Mother and child are sung, but seldom father; fugitive and weary
wanderer call for pity and affection, but there is little of wooing and
wedding; the rocks and the mountains are well known, but home is
unknown. Strange blending of love and helplessness 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” and the “Farewell,

farewell, my only child.”
Love-songs are scarce and fall into two categories—the frivolous
and light, and the sad. Of deep successful love there is ominous
silence, and in one of the oldest of these songs there is a depth of
history and meaning:

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A black woman said of the song, “It can’t be sung without a full
heart and a troubled sperrit.” The same voice sings here that 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 it familiarly

and even fondly as simply a crossing of the waters, perhaps—who
knows?—back to his ancient forests again. Later 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 world

undergo characteristic change when they enter the mouth of the
slave. Especially is this true of Bible phrases. “Weep, O captive
daughter of Zion,” is quaintly turned into “Zion, weep-a-low,” and
the wheels 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 improvised by

some leading minstrel of the religious band. The circumstances of
the gathering, however, the rhythm of the songs, and the limitations
of allowable thought, confined the poetry for the most part to single
or double lines, and they seldom were expanded to quatrains or
longer tales, although there are some few examples of sustained
efforts, chiefly paraphrases of the Bible. Three short series of verses
have always attracted me,—the one that heads this chapter, of one
line of which Thomas Wentworth Higginson has fittingly said,
“Never, it seems to me, since man first lived and suffered was his
infinite longing for peace uttered more plaintively.” The second and
third 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 low coast lands:
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“Michael, haul the boat ashore,
Then you’ll hear the horn they blow,
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 breathes a hope
—a faith in the ultimate justice of things. The minor cadences of
despair change often to triumph and calm confidence. Sometimes it
is faith in life, sometimes a faith in death, sometimes assurance of
boundless justice in some fair world beyond. But whichever it is, the
meaning is always clear: that sometime, 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 the probation
of races is past, and that the backward races of to-day are of proven
inefficiency and not worth the saving. Such an assumption is the
arrogance of peoples irreverent toward Time and ignorant of the
deeds of men. A thousand years ago such an assumption, easily
possible, would have made it difficult for the Teuton to prove his
right to life. Two thousand years ago such dogmatism, readily
welcome, would have scouted the idea of blond races ever leading
civilization. So wofully unorganized is sociological knowledge that
the meaning of progress, the meaning of “swift” and “slow” in
human doing, and the limits of human perfectability, are veiled,
unanswered sphinxes on the shores of science. Why should Æschylus
have sung two thousand years before Shakespeare was born? Why
has civilization flourished in Europe, and flickered, flamed, and died
in Africa? So long as the world stands meekly dumb before such
questions, shall this nation proclaim its ignorance and unhallowed
prejudices by denying freedom of opportunity to those who brought
the Sorrow Songs to the Seats of the Mighty?
Your country? How came it yours? Before the Pilgrims landed we
were here. Here we have brought our three gifts and mingled them
with yours: a gift of story and song—soft, stirring melody in an ill-
harmonized and unmelodious land; the gift of sweat and brawn to
beat back the wilderness, conquer the soil, and lay the foundations of
this vast economic empire two hundred years earlier than your weak
hands could have done it; the third, a gift of the Spirit. Around us the
history of the land has centred for thrice a hundred years; out of the
nation’s heart we have called all that was best to throttle and subdue
all that was worst; fire and blood, prayer and sacrifice, have billowed
over this people, and they have found peace only in the altars of the
God of Right. Nor has our gift of the Spirit been merely passive.
Actively we have woven ourselves with the very warp and woof of
this nation,—we fought their battles, shared their sorrow, mingled
our blood with theirs, and generation after generation have pleaded
with a headstrong, careless people to despise 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 in blood-
brotherhood. Are not these gifts worth the giving? Is not this work

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and striving? Would America have been America without her Negro
people?
Even so is the hope that sang in the songs of my fathers well sung.
If somewhere in this whirl and chaos of things there dwells Eternal
Good, pitiful yet masterful, then anon in His good time America shall
rend the Veil and the prisoned shall go free. Free, free as the sunshine
trickling down the morning into these high windows of mine, free as
yonder fresh young voices welling up to me from the caverns of
brick and mortar below—swelling with song, instinct with life,
tremulous treble and darkening bass. My children, my little children,
are singing to the sunshine, and thus they sing:

And the traveller girds himself, and sets his face toward the
Morning, and goes his way.

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The Afterthought
Hear my cry, O God the Reader; vouchsafe that this my book fall
not still-born into the world wilderness. Let there spring, Gentle One,
from out its leaves vigor of thought and thoughtful deed to reap the
harvest wonderful. Let the ears of a guilty people tingle with truth,
and seventy millions sigh for the righteousness which exalteth
nations, in this drear day when human brotherhood is mockery and a
snare. Thus in Thy good time may infinite reason turn the tangle
straight, and these crooked marks on a fragile leaf be not indeed

THE END

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