THE NEGRO AMERICAN CITIZEN IN THE
NEW AMERICAN LIFE.
BY REV. A. D. MAYO, A.M.
During the past ten years of a Ministry of Education among the
Southern people in all the Southern States, I have been often chal¬
lenged to formulate my opinion concerning the present condition and
future outcome of the Negro. My invariable answer is: I have come
to this portion of the country as an out-and-out advocate of the uni¬
versal education of the heart, the head, and the hand possible for all
orders and conditions of the American people. I believe the Christian
religion, as it lay in the mind and shone forth in the speech and life
of the great Teacher and Saviour of man, includes this idea of educa¬
tion. All the progress this world has seen out of old pagan conditions
of race, caste, society, and government, has been the work of this
mighty regenerating influence. I hold it the deadliest treason and
revolt against the Christian civilization, a backing down into pagan¬
ism, or a worse lapse into the Slough of Despond of absolute atheism
and secularism, to impeach the power of this divine agency to cure all
our American ills.
I began my present Ministry of Education ten years ago, in the
Southern States, in fulj. faith in this gospel of the reconstruction of
the whole republic from " the remainder of wrath " that still vexes its
progress and looms like a black despair over its least advanced
portion. And, although I cannot pretend to -have converted or
convinced anybody, I have seen with what an uplifting of the soul the
better sort of the Southern people welcome any man who, in honesty
of purpose, love of country and of all his countrymen, endeavors to
get down to the bottom facts of the situation, with a just appreciation
of the position of all true men, and with an invincible hope and a
holy obstinacy in standing by the bright side of God's providence in
American affairs. The fact that one man can go through all these
States, among all classes, everywhere testifying to the grandeur of the
full American idea, and urging the people to live up to the vision of
the Fathers, with all but universal acceptation, so that the discords in
this ministry have hardly been enough to emphasize the harmonies, is
to me an assurance that the same line of work, assumed by a greater
2
man, and finally adopted by the influential classes of our people, will
shape the highway out of the present complications.
My only recipe for the solution of all these problems that still
divide the country is the putting on of that judicial and resolute Chris¬
tian attitude of mind that insists on looking at all the facts of the
case, setting them in their proper relations, all the time searching
for the elements of progress which are the vital centres. It seems to
me that a great portion of the misunderstanding and conflict, at
present, is the result of a practical inability in the masses of the
people to rise to this position and the mischievous pertinacity of too
many leaders of public opinion everywhere, in keeping the national
mind engrossed with the temporary and unessential facts of the case.
With no disposition to misrepresent or misunderstand anybody, I
respond to your call to tell my experience as an observer of the
Southern situation, especially as it concerns the Negro citizen in the
sixteen Southern States of the Union, as I have seen him during a
virtual residence in these States for ten years past.
It would seem that thoughtful Christian people might at least
endeavor to realize the simple gospel rule of " doing as they would be
done by " in the judgment of each other, in an affair so momentous,
where mistakes are fraught with such mournful possibilities as in this
great discussion. It is easy to see how much of the difficulty comes
from this inability to " put one's self in the place " of his opponent.
Would it not be possible for a larger number of our foremost
Southern leaders, in Church, State, and society, to try to appreciate
the motives and temper of the loyal people of the North in the great
act of conferring full American citizenship on the Negro, after his
emancipation, twenty-five years ago ? I do not defend any injustice,
tyranny,.reckless experimenting with government itself, that followed
that act. No thoughtful man defends such things to-day. But I do
hold that no true conception of this matter can be had by any man
who honestly believed that this exaltation of the Negro to full Amer¬
ican citizenship was either an act of sectional revenge, a narrow and
ferocious partisan policy or the reckless experiment of an excited
sentimentalism. If ever a people, in a great national emergency,
acted under a solemn sense of responsibility to God, humanity,
patriotism, and republican institutions, I believe the conviction of the
loyal Northern people, that shaped the acts of reconstruction, is entitled
to this judgment, and will so abide in history. It was the most memo¬
rable testimony of a national government, just rescued from desperate
peril, solemnized by the death of its venerated leader, to its faith in
popular institutions, recorded in the annals of mankind.
But it must be acknowledged that the very nobility of the act that
conferred the highest earthly distinction of full American citizenship
on a nation of newly emancipated slaves, of an alien race, involved
the penalty of great injustice to its object. It was inevitable that the
nation, having committed itself to this daring experiment, would watch
its success from an ideal point of observation. So, for the past twenty
years, one misfortune of the Negro citizen has been that the portion
of the country that won his freedom and lifted him to this proud
eminence could do no otherwise than judge him out of its own lofty
expectation, piecing out its almost complete ignorance of any similar
3
people or situation by repeated drafts on a boundless hope, an almost
childlike trust, and a deep religious faith, proven by the cheerful
giving of fifty millions of dollars and the sacrifice of the service of
noble men and women of priceless value, in the effort to realize the
great expectation of the nation.
Again, is it more than plain justice that the leading mind of the
loyal North, that saved the Union to nationality and freedom in 1865,
should endeavor to represent to itself the actual point of view of the
Southern people concerning this act of reconstruction, then, and, to a
great extent, in the present time ? I know that the most painful les¬
son of history is the difficulty of such comprehension of an aristo¬
cratic form of society by a people for a century trained in the school
of a proud and successful democracy. Not one educated man in a
thousand in the United States can put himself in the place of one of
the great Tory leaders or scholars of Great Britain, or listen with
anything but impatience to the account that any European government
or the Catholic Church can give of itself. How much more difficult
for the average New England or Western citizen to understand the
attitude of mind with which an old Southern planter or a modern
Southern politician must contemplate this sudden and portentous
upheaving of five millions of freedmen to the complete endowment of
American citizenship at the close of the great war.
For, surely, at first sight, no body of five millions of people could
be imagined less qualified by its past to justify such expectations
than the Negro freedmen. Three hundred years ago the Negro was
a pagan savage, inhabiting a continent still dark with the shadow of
an unrecorded past. A hundred years ago the ancestors perhaps of
a majority of the seven millions of Negroes now in the United States
were in the same condition. Of no people on the face of the earth is
so little known to-day as of the African ancestors of the American
Negro. Of various tribes, nationalities, and characteristics, perhaps
with an ancestry as varied as the present inhabitants of the European
nationalities, these people were cast into a state of slavery which con¬
founded all previous conditions, and only recognized the native ability
of each man or woman in " the survival of the fittest," in the struggle
for existence on the plantation and in the household.
Once more : it has never been realized by the loyal North, what is
evident to every intelligent Southern man, what a prodigious change
had been wrought in this people during its years of bondage, and
how, without the schooling of this era, the subsequent elevation of
the emancipated slave to full American citizenship would have been
an impossibility. During this brief period of tutelage, briefest of all
compared with any European race, the Negro was sheltered from the
three furies of the prayer book,— sword, pestilence, and famine,—
was brought into contact with the upper strata of the most powerful
of civilized peoples, in a republic, amid the trials, sacrifices, and edu¬
cating influences of a new country, in the opening years of " the
grand and awful time " in which our lot is cast. In that condition, he
learned the three great elements of civilization more speedily than
they were ever learned before. He learned to work. He acquired
the language and adopted the religion of the most progressive of
peoples. Gifted with a marvellous aptitude for such schooling, he
4
was found, in 1865, further " out of the woods " of barbarism than
any other people at the end of a thousand years. The American Ind¬
ian, in his proud isolation, repelled all these beneficent changes;
and to-day the entire philanthropy, religion, and statesmanship of
the republic are wrestling with the problem of saving him from the
fate of the buffalo.
I find only in the broad-minded and most charitable leaders of our
Northern affairs any real understanding of the inevitable habit of
mind which the average Southern citizen brings to the contemplation
of the actual condition or possibilities of the Negro American citizen.
With a personal attachment to the Negro greater than is possible for
the people of the North ; with habits of forbearance and patient
waiting on the infirmities, vices, and shortcomings of this people,
which to the North are unaccountable and well-nigh impossible of
imitation; with the general willingness to co-operate, as far as the
comfort and the personal prosperity of its old slaves are concerned,—
is it strange that this act of statesmanship should appear to him as
the wildest and most reckless experiment in the annals of national
life ? Even the most intelligent and conservative parent finds it diffi¬
cult to believe his beloved child is competent to the duties of man¬
hood or womanhood, and only with a pang does he see the dear boy
or girl launch out on the stormy ocean of life. What, then, would
be the inevitable feeling of the dominant Southern class, to whom
the Negro had only been known' as a savage slowly evolving into
the humbler strata of civilization, as a dependent chattel, when, at
the end of a frightful war, it found itself in a state of civil subjuga¬
tion to its old bondmen? No subject race ever reveals its highest
aspirations and aptitudes to its master race; and it is not remarkable
that only the most observing and broad-minded of the Southern peo¬
ple, even yet, heartily believe in the capacity of the Negro for civil,
social, or industrial co-operation with any of the European peoples.
Now, say what we will, this obstinate inability and sometimes un¬
willingness to put one's self in the place of the opposition has been the
most hopeless feature of the case, the real " chasm" between the
leading mind of the North and the South. So to-day, while even
partisan politics seems to pause in uncertainty on the steep edge of a
dark abyss, when noble and humane people all over the country seem
to be falling into despondency, when an ominous twilight, threatening
a storm, is peopled by all the birds of ill omen, and " the hearts of men
are shaken with fear," I am glad that we have been summoned here to
look things squarely in the face, to bring a varied experience to bear
on a new and more careful consideration of the whole matter, and
by the guidance of a Christian insight endeavor to see the hopeful
elements of the situation. We do not need to rehearse our separate
knowledge of the shadow side of the new South. The shadows we
have always with us, everywhere. But, if we can locate the centre of
the new " Sunny South," we may go home with the conviction that,
while the shadows in human affairs are always on the move, the sun
shines on forever, and is bound to bring in God's final day of light.
The pivotal question on which this vast problem turns is, Has the
Negro, in his American experience, demonstrated a capacity for self-
developing American citizenship? I leave out of the estimate, at
5
present, the exceptional people of the race, and look for the answer
to the average Negro, as I see him in the Southern States. For I
suppose nobody believes that full American citizenship is possible, as
the permanent condition of any people destitute of this capacity for
self-dependent manhood and womanhood. The child race must be
cared for by a paternal organization of society, and that element of
paternalism is just what every good American citizen declares he will
not have in his government. In lieu of that, an extemporized or
permanent social public opinion, or an unwritten law, will take its
place and do its work.
If the Negro, as so many Southern people believe, is only a per¬
petual child, capable of a great deal that is useful and interesting,
but destitute of the capacity for " the one thing needful " that lifts the
subject of paternal up to the citizen of a republican government, then
the thing to do is to leave him to the care of his superiors in the
South, who certainly know this side of him far better than the people
of the North, and, whatever mistakes on the side of occasional severity
may be made, will, in the end, do the best for his permanent estate.
In fact, nothing seems more evident to me than the practical inability
of the national government to essentially change the status of its seven
millions of Negro citizens, except through national aid to education.
There is no power at Washington that can hold up, for a series of
generations, any people in the permanent state of illiteracy in which
the majority of the Southern Negroes are at present found. This
illiteracy is simply a mixture of ignorance, superstition, shiftlessness,
vulgarity, and vice. The general and State governments, aided all
the while by private benevolence and missionary zeal, can surround
these people with an environment of valuable opportunities. Indeed,
in many respects, they are now environed with such helps and encour¬
agements as no race, of European lineage, has enjoyed at a similar
stage of its history. But the test question is, Has the Negro, on the
whole, during his entire Kfe of three hundred years on American soil,
indicated his power to appreciate and use such opportunities for full
American citizenship as are now vouchsafed to him by a gracious
Providence ?
To my mind he had vindicated his capacity for indefinite improve¬
ment in this direction even before he received the precious boon of
citizenship of the American republic. Remarkable as his progress,
in some ways, has been during the past twenty-five years of freedom,
I would be content to refer to his two centuries of slavery for proof
of a remarkable aptitude for civilization. The best evidence for such
capacity is a certain unconscious tact, a habit of getting on in a toler¬
able way under unfavorable circumstances, the turning his sunny and
adaptive side to a hard bondage, the eager adaptation to and taking
on of all helps to a better state of living. Contemplate, for a
moment, this people, landing from an African slave-ship on our
shores. Contrast the status of the American Negro, with all his
imperfections, in 1865, when he appeared, the last comer that has
stepped over the threshold of the higher civilization and begun the
upward career. How can that amazing progress in practical ability,
in adaptation to the habits and manners of civilized life, reception of
a Christian faith, be accounted for on the theory of perpetual child-
6
ishness, as a race characteristic ? Did any people, under a similar
strain, realizing, as the Negro did, the awful issues of the mighty
Civil War amid which his closing years of servitude were involved,
ever bear itself with such personal fidelity to present duty, with
such remarkable wisdom and tact, with such complete reliance on
Providence for the result?
Bishop Haygood says the religion of the Negro accounts for his
bearing during these tremendous years, when the home life of the
South was virtually in his hands. That a race, less than two cen¬
turies out of the jungle of African paganism, was found so imbued
with the central element of Christianity, is evidence that it is not the
perpetual child of humanity. Grant the failure of the Negro, during
the fearful years that followed the war, to govern States rocking in
the throes of a defeated rebellion, exasperated to the death by all the
passions that wreck the souls of men and communities. Still, what
a display of ability of many sorts, the practical faculty of getting
a living, often the higher faculty that has thrown up thousands of
shrewd, successful people, there was ! Radical that he is, the Negro
has shown himself the most politic of peoples in his endurance of
what could not be overcome, and his tactful, even crafty, appropria¬
tion of all opportunities. He has pushed in at every open door,
listened at the white man's table, hung about church and the stump,
taken in the great public day, looked on when he did not vote at the
election. He has been all eyes and ears, and every pore of his skin
has been open to the incoming of his only possible education.
Deprived of books and the ordinary apparatus of instruction, he has
used all the more eagerly the agencies of God's supreme University,
human life,— used them so much better than several millions of "the
superior race " that, in proportion to his opportunity, he has made
more out of the Southern American life than any other Southern
people.
On the eve of the day when the great assembly of Confederate
veterans at Richmond solemnly buried their old cause in the unveiling
of the statue of their great military commander, I sat on a platform,
before a crowded congregation of Negro citizens, in the city of Wash¬
ington, gathered at the commencement exercises of Wayland Semi¬
nary. Eighteen young men and women, all from Virginia, received
the diploma; and ten of them appeared in the usual way. As I
looked over that audience of well-dressed, well-mannered, apprecia¬
tive people, and listened to the speeches of those young folk, so
marked by sobriety of style, soundness of thought, practical views of
life, lofty consecration of purpose, and comprehensive patriotism ; as
I read their class motto, " Not to be ministered unto, but to minis¬
ter," and remembered that, only two hundred and seventy years
ago, the first cargo of African pagan savages was landed on the
shore of the Old Dominion, and all this was the outcome of that,—
I wondered where were the eyes of men that they did not behold the
revelation of Divine Providence in this little less than the miraculous
evolution of the new citizenship of a State destined yet to praise and
magnify the ways of God in American affairs. Say that this only
demonstrates his " power of imitation." But what is this mysterious
faculty of "imitation," that everybody says the Negro has to the last
7
degree, but another name for a capacity for civilization ? Nine-
tenths of our human education is imitating what a superior person
does, from the child repeating its mother's words to the saint " put¬
ting on the Lord Jesus Christ."
It may be granted that, in one respect, slavery was a help to this
progress. It protected the Negro from his lower self, on the side of
vagrancy; and that is " the terrible temptation " of every people in
its rudimentary years. He was protected against vagrancy, laziness,
drunkenness, and several temptations of a semi-tropical clime which
are too much for thousands of his betters. But here has been a sore
obstacle to his success in his new estate of freedom. A great wrong
that has been done him during these years has been the neglect to
enforce order, decency, and industry, along with the observance of
the common moralities of every-day life, by the people among whom
he has lived. What would be the condition of New England to-day,
had her people tolerated, in the multitudes of foreign-born peasants
"who have landed on her shores, the vagrancy, laziness, shiftless-
ness, dependence on common charity, with the perpetual violation
of the minor morals, which confront the observer, from every
part of the civilized world, in his travels throughout the Southern
States ? Here was the place for the Anglo-Saxon to assert his
superiority, by insisting on the common observance of the com¬
mon, order, decencies, and moralities of life, in and out of the house¬
hold, by the freedman. For lack of this, the vagrant class has been
left virtually at large, like a plague of frogs and lice over all the land,
choking up the towns and villages, making good housekeeping, for
the Southern woman, the most trying human lot, and surrounding
childhood, of every condition and class, with such temptations as no
people can permanently resist.
If the well-disposed class, the majority, could have been aided by
the law of the land and public opinion to move on unhindered by
this intolerable impediment, the last twenty-five years would have told
a far different tale. Of course, the white people of the South do not
realize this. Slavery was a police that made vagrancy impossible,
and the lower slave element was securely locked up under the Argus
eyes of the old-time system of labor. I am not here to defend any
denial of the suffrage, or social or industrial disability, inflicted on
the Negro citizen; but I give it as my deliberate conviction that all
these things have not been so harmful to the Negro as this strange
neglect of the Anglo-Saxon South to enforce the recognized policy of
all civilized lands on its vagrant colored and white class, at the very
time when this race specially needed the primary lessons of sobriety,
obedience to law, every-day morality, and of that hard work without
which " no man shall eat." Yet, spite of this drawback (and only an
observer from a differently regulated community can appreciate what
a drawback), the better-disposed class of the Negroes has signally
vindicated its capacity for civilization within the limitations of per¬
sonal and race impediments, and in the use it has made of its
opportunities.
I observe, also, in the average Negro, an amiability, a patience and
forbearance, a capacity for affectionate devotion, sacrifice, and un¬
selfishness, that separate him decisively from the savage and the savage
8
side of civilized life. What an element of civil, social, and industrial
lubrication this may become, has already become, in our grating,
pitiless, ferocious Anglo-Saxon greed of power, gain, and all kinds of
superiority, any man can realize who sees the working of it in a
thousand ways. I can understand why the Southerner feels a certain
loneliness amid the splendors and well-ordered regulations of our
higher Northern life. He misses the atmosphere of kindliness,
broad good-humor, real belief in human nature, that the Negro always
diffuses around himself. I feel it the moment I touch a Northern
city on my return from every annual visit to the South; and I thank
God that the Negro "man and brother," especially the woman and
sister, were sent by heaven to teach our proud, restless, too often in¬
human civilization some of the amenities that outlive the inhumanities
and finally bring in the kingdom of God.
Another quality the Negro displays, of great promise in the future,
though so often turned to his disadvantage in the present,— a love
of approbation, self-possession, and an ability to " put his best foot
foremost" and show for all he is worth, the perpetual assertion that
he is going to be somebody some time. " Why did you sell that corn
you promised to me?" said a white parson to his Negro "brother in
the ministry." "Well, boss, I got a bigger price for it." "But was
that honest?" "No, it warn't that." "Why did you do it?" "Be¬
cause, boss, I warn't the man I took myself to be."
It is well to " take yourself to be " a man of parts and character,
even at the peril of disappointment. And that persistent pushing
to the front, crowding in at every open door, "claiming the earth,"
which now makes the life of the most sensible and considerate white
citizen of the South often a weariness, sometimes a despair, in his
dealing with the Negro, is the prophecy of an aspiration for better
things and a loftiness of manhood and womanhood of vital impor¬
tance.
Along with this is the eagerness for knowledge, that is still a char¬
acteristic even of the ignorant classes, though less apparent now than
in the years following the war. Spite of the neglect of the proper
conditions and the means of gaining this precious boon for the chil¬
dren, the average Negro, in humble estate, believes in the school with
a vigor that in the lower European classes is not developed, more
than in the corresponding class among the Southern whites. • Discon¬
tent with a low estate is the movement power of American civili¬
zation, and no class in America is less content with its own infirmi¬
ties than the better sort, the majority of the freedmen.
Another valuable characteristic is the good taste, love of beauty,
native capacity for ornamental art, which always appear in the Negro,
when suitably encouraged. The handwriting in the colored schools
is often remarkable, the drawing uniformly respectable, the taste in
dress, the arrangement of flowers and ornaments, above the average
of any corresponding class in the country. In the Negro, the new
South has its most valuable deposit of " raw material" for the best
operative and mechanical class for that clime and country. Already
he is domesticated in all these mechanical and operative industries,
with the exception of the cotton mills, where the labor is still monopo¬
lized by the poorer white class, greatly to its own advantage. Here
9
is a great work being done by the numerous mission schools, of the
higher sort, supported by the Christian people of the North, in the
organization of industrial education. In this important branch of
schooling, the superior class of Negro youth has, so far, enjoyed
greater opportunities than the corresponding class of white youth.
And, although the graduates of these schools will not be day laborers
or servants, yet, as teachers, housekeepers, and general leaders of
their people, they will exert a prodigious influence in the years to
come. The introduction of a simple and practical annex for industrial
education, for both sexes, in the school system of the South, espe¬
cially for the Negro children, would be a movement of incalculable
value to the whole people of that region, so much in need of intelli¬
gent and skilled labor in the uprising of its new industrial life.
All these qualities tell in the steady progress of large numbers of
these people toward a more comfortable, wholesome, and respectable
way of living. This is evident especially to a regular visitor, not
involved in the wear and tear of seven millions of freedmen getting
on their citizen legs, as are our Southern white brothers and sisters.
I see, everywhere, every year, a larger number of well-looking, well-
dressed, well-churched, housed, well-mannered colored people. One
reason why our Southern friends are not so impressed with this up¬
ward movement is that, as soon as a colored family gets above the
humble or vagrant class, it somehow disappears from the ordinary
view. One inevitable result of the social boycott that shuts down on
every Negro family that attains respectability is that its white neigh¬
bors are put out of connection with this class, and left to the tender
mercies of the class beneath, where their patience is worn out, and,
too often, the impression taken for the whole race. The estimate
of the increasing wealth of the Negroes is often disputed; but, at the
most reasonable figure, it is a significant testimony to the growth of
practical enterprise and steady improvement in the upper strata of
the whole body.
While the acknowledged vices of the race are still a terrible weight
on the lower and a constant temptation and humiliation to the better
class, it is not certain that any of them, save those " failings that lean
to virtue's side," are especially "race defects." A distinguished
physician of Alabama has shown that the illegitimate births among
the Negro population of the black belt of that State are in the exact
per cent, of the Kingdom of Bavaria. Certainly, the vices of the
lower class of the south of Europe people, that are now swarming
the shores of the Gulf States, are not less common, and far more
dangerous, than those of the Negro. Human nature, in its lower
estate, especially when shot out from its barbarism into the devil-
side of civilization, is fearfully deficient in its appreciation of the ten
commandments. But I believe no people of the humbler sort are
making more progress in overcoming the weakness of the appetites
and getting in sight of the Christian moralities than the better sort
of the Negroes. In the church, the home, and the school, I see the
growth of a self-respecting manhood and womanhood that in due time
will tell.
Though differing from many whose opinions and experience I
respect, I do not regard the temporary isolation of the Negro in the
IO
Southern church, school, and society, so much an evil as a providen¬
tial aid in gaining the self-respect and habit of self-help absolutely
essential to good citizenship. Spite of the hard side of slavery, the
Negro has not had his fair share of the rough training that brings out
the final results and the determination that tell in history. A habit
of dependence, even to the extent of servility, in the lower orders, is
still one of his most dangerous temptations. He has also been greatly
tried by being, for a generation, the romantic figure of American life,
— the especial object of philanthropic interest in Church, State, and
society, everywhere outside the sixteen Southern States. It is well
that he should be relieved for a while from these temptations. In
company with the white boy, the Negro boy, on the same school
bench, would all the time be tempted to fall into his old position of
an annex to the white man, and, in the Church, would be under a
strain that would sorely tax his manhood. Where he is, he grows
up with a wholesome confidence in himself. His own best people
are teaching him, with no hindrance, the law of responsible manhood
and womanhood. The result is that, when he emerges into active
life, if he has well appropriated his training, he is in a position to
treat with a similar class of white people on terms that insure mutual
respect.
I am struck with this feature of Southern society,— the constant
" working together for good " of the better class, especially of the men
of both races in all communities. The outrage «f a drunken rabble
upon a Negro settlement is published to all the world; while the
constant intercourse of the respectable classes of men of the two races,
that prevents a thousand such outbreaks and makes Southern life, on
the whole, orderly, like the progress of the seasons and the hours,
goes on in silence. It is not necessary to project the social question
into the heart of communities in this state of transition. The very
zealous brethren of the press and the political fold, who are digging
this " last ditch " of social caste, away out in the wilderness, half a
century ahead of any present emergency, may be assured that nobody
in the United States will ever be obliged to associate with people
disagreeable to him, and that, as Thomas Jefferson suggested, " if we
educate the children of to-day, our descendants will be wiser than we,
and many things that seem impossible to us may be easily accom¬
plished by them." At present, the office of colored teacher and
preacher is the noblest opportunity for general usefulness granted to
an educated, righteous, and able young man or woman in any land.
That teacher or preacher becomes the man or woman of all spiritual
work to a constituency singularly appreciative ; if instructed in indus¬
trial craft, all the more valuable. I am amazed at the assertion of
some eminent people that the superior education of the Negro youth
has been a failure. If the destiny of the Negro is only that of a
child-peasant forever, this is true; but, if his range of possibility is
what we believe, no such result of even a modified form of the
secondary and higher education} with industrial accompaniments, has
ever been seen in Christendom, as is evident to any man who regards
this side of the life of this people with open eyes.
All that I have said bears on a fundamental truth concerning the
uplifting of the American Negro citizen. The Northern white man,
11
especially if a philanthropist, regards the Negro as an annex to the
Northern, the Southern white man regards him as an annex to the
Southern white citizen : but the Negro is anything but an annex to
anybody. He is an original element, providentially injected into
American civilization,— the only man who did not come to us of his
own will. It may turn out, for that reason, that he is to be the " little
child that shall lead them," and finally compel a reconciliation of all
the distracting elements of our national life. Every race that has any
outcome finally demonstrates its capacity by throwing up a superior
class by which it is led, stimulated, and gradually lifted to its own
highest achievement of civilization. Tried by this test, the Negro is
not behind.
I have spoken so far of the average man and woman of the race.
But that observer must be strangely blinded who does not see the
evidence of the formation of a genuine aristocracy of intelligence,
character, industry, and superior living among these millions. I do
not refer to that unfortunate class who assert a superficial superiority
by separation from their people and an uneasy longing to be recog¬
nized by their white superiors. I mean the growing class that is try¬
ing, under a solemn sense of gratitude to God, love to the brother,
and consecrated patriotism, to lift up its own race. Among the
seven millions of this people in the United States, there must be
several hundred thousand of this sort. They are found everywhere,
all the way from Massachusetts to Texas. They already form a
distinct society; and the most American of all our great newspa¬
pers, the Cincinnati Commercial Gazette, has already recognized the
fact by the prominent " Colored Society Column" in its Sunday
morning issue. This class is becoming a distinct power, and its
influence on the classes below is one of the most important elements
of the race problem. It is already on good terms with the corre¬
sponding class of white people, though differing in politics and often
grieved by what it regards public, social, and industrial injustice.
One significant fact in this connection is that now the Negro is the
most determined Southerner. The young Southern white man, re¬
lieved from the attractions of the old aristocratic position of slave¬
holder, like all American young men of parts, is on the lookout for
the main chance. The South is less and less to him a name to charm
with. His own State no longer seems to him a " nation" which
claims his uttermost devotion. A million of these young men, it is
said, have left the South for the North and North-west since the war.
Whole regions of these older States are as steadily drained of this im¬
portant population as the older portions of the North-east. The
Southern young woman will follow as soon as her call is heard. At
present she is the " main-stay " of the rural South, the good angel of its
coming civilization, getting more education and having more to do
with the upper story of Southern life than her average male com¬
panion who stays at home. But the Negro loves the sacred soil, the
old home, the climate, and its surroundings. In due time he will
become the dominant occupant of large portions of the lowland
South. He has no more idea of going to Africa than the Southern
Jew of going into business in Jerusalem. He will move about as he
becomes more intelligent and understands his own interests; but he
12
is the Southerner of to-day, and all persuasion or threats that would
dislodge him are vain. As the political issues of the past fade into
the distance, he will more and more act in all public affairs with the
leading race, with whom his companionship and interest belong. He
must be educated where he is; and, as the years go on, he will rise to
the call of his own superior class and find his own place,— a great
arid beneficent place in our wonderful American family.
Education is the lever that will raise this great mass of humanity to
the high plane of full American citizenship. I believe it would be a
great blessing to the whole South, could the suffrage, educational,
labor, and vagrant laws of Massachusetts be incorporated into the
legislation of every Southern State. Protection to the child, suppres¬
sion of vagrancy, enforcement of industry, an educational test of
suffrage, better churching, improvement in the home, reading of good
books, all the influences that are so potent in any respectable
Northern community, will in good time achieve the success of every
class and race of the American people. For the Negro, two-thirds of
this education must be, for a generation, outside the school-room, in
the broad university of the new Southern American life. If we only
knew it, this is one of the richest educational opportunities God has
ever vouchsafed to any people.
What a call is this opportunity for missionary service, in its
broadest and loftiest aspect, to the whole American people. Every
theory of despair on the race problem proceeds from a pagan or
atheistic estimate of human nature and destiny, and leads down to
despotism or anarchy. Without the blessed gospel of Christ, our
American race problem would be too awful to contemplate. Thank
God, it did not come to us in an age of pagan darkness, of mediaeval
violence, in a land crowded with people, in a civilization cursed by
the bitter results of a long and stormy past. It came to us in an
opening age of light, when all the celestial forces are at an upward
slant, when the Church is getting itself together to work for man
while God takes care of the creeds,'in a country so large and bountiful
that hundreds of millions would not crowd it, and " every man may
sit under his own vine and fig-tree, with no one to molest and make
afraid."
As I am borne through the vast spaces of our marvellous Southern
land, and stand in amazement before its revelation of resources,
hitherto unknown, I ask myself; — Is this only to become the theatre
of a greater greed of gain, " a hazard of new fortunes," its only out¬
come a semi-tropical materialism, an inevitable temptation to a dis¬
mal era of "booms" and "syndicates" and "trusts," with a new
insanity for the almighty dollar, so powerless to satisfy the deeper
need of the humbles!; human heart ? May it not, rather, be God's
summons to such an awakening of our overworked and material¬
ized American people as will compel them, in sheer self-defence,
to give mind and heart and haqd to that lifting up of the lowly,
and that preaching the gospel of .self-help to the poor, which is the
end of Christian charity ? I look for the day when the divided
churches of our three great Protestant denominations will be brought
together by the growing sense of this " home mission" claim, and
the whole Church and the adjacent realm of the world be polarized
13
in one supreme effort to solve this old caste puzzle of the nations
and ages, by showing that the simple gospel of Christ means peace
on earth and good will to all men.
But now comes the final question, on which not so much the destiny
of the Negro citizen as the very existence of Southern American
civilization depends. Will the Anglo-Saxon Southern people, at
present nine-tenths of the entire white population, in due time
appreciate this opportunity, and join hands with all good men and
women, at home and abroad, in this, the grandest crusade of all the
ages ?
I have no doubt that the race problem will finally be solved, in the
South, largely through the agency of the Southern Anglo-Saxon peo¬
ple,— not over their heads, but with their thorough co-operation.
I see already, amid superficial indications to the contrary, the converg¬
ing lines of this tendency, and, below hostile theories, the inevita¬
ble drift of the common life of all these great commonwealths towards
the American type of society.
I see the positive indication of this great convergence of opinion,
especially in what may be called the Educational Public of the South.
By this, I mean that portion of the Southern people, of all classes
and both races, which within the past twenty-five years, amid diffi¬
culties and complications almost unconquerable elsewhere, has quietly
and persistently laid the foundations of the American system of uni¬
versal education in every State, county, city, and neighborhood in
these sixteen commonwealths.
The common school is so much the habit and unquestioned postulate
of republican government everywhere in the North that we have never
done half justice to the people of the sixteen Southern States for
this, by all odds, the most significant movement of the past genera¬
tion this side the water. That a people, in i860 the most aristocratic
in organization of its society upon earth, who fought through a bloody
war and only fell in " the last ditch " of the absolute ruin of their
old social order, should have risen up from this awful overthrow,
cleared the ground of rubbish, and, with scarcely any aid that they
could use, of their own will have planted on the soil the one institution
that is the eternal foe of everything save republican government and
democratic society, is the wonder of the age, and the complete vindi¬
cation of the essential Americanism of the Southern people. It would
be well for our cynical scholars and self-confident politicians, who
dilate on the imperfections of this system of education, to remem¬
ber what Massachusetts was, fifty years ago, when Horace Mann
drew his sword, what Pennsylvania was, thirty years ago, when Wick-
ersham took command, what even to-day some portions of the older
Atlantic States are declared by the testimony of their own educa¬
tional authorities to be. Doubtless there has been exaggeration of
the achievement of the South in popular education, partly through
ignorance, more in the way of home advertisement, most in the
interest of the defeat of the Blair, Bill. But, with all this drawback,
the Southern people have taken " the first step that costs," and estab¬
lished the free school, for all classes and both races, unsectarian, but
practically one of the most potent moral and religious forces of this
section, growing all the time, already beyond the peril of destruction
or serious damage from its numerous enemies ; and it " has come to
14
stay." True, the educational public has not half converted the aver¬
age Southern politician, for whom, as General Grant said, " there is
too much reading and writing now." It has not yet entirely swung
the Southern clergy and the Church over to its hearty support, as
against the old-time Protestant parochial and private system of
instruction. It is still a social outsider in some regions ; and, through
vast spaces of the rural South, it is so poor that it seems to have
hindered more than helped the better-off classes who shoulder its
expenses. But it has for the first time gone down into the basement
story of the Southern household, bearing that common schooling to
the lower orders and the " plain people," which means ihodern civili¬
zation and progressive Christianity, involving the full committal to the
new American order of affairs. It is a wonder that the leading
classes of the North — the press, the political organizations, the indus¬
trial leaders, even the philanthropists — are still so imperfectly
informed concerning this, by all odds, the most vital and significant
end of Southern life. The splendid mission work of our Northern
churches, 'which, indirectly, has so greatly aided the growth of the
schools for the Negroes by training their teachers, has sometimes
obscured the magnitude of the home work. But this, with the
remarkable rally of the whole secondary and higher education, is a
demonstration that the South has no intention of remaining perma¬
nently in any second place in the great educational movement of the
time. Imperfect as the common school is, the Negro has been the
greatest gainer therefrom; for, through it and all that goes along
therewith, he is laying up a steady increase of self-respect, intelli¬
gence, and practical power, which will astonish many good people
who still go on repeating the parrot cry that education has only
demoralized the younger Negro generation for the industrial side of
life. But it is not what the common schools have done, but what
the Southern people has failed to do to re-enforce them, that still
holds thousands of Negro youth in the bonds of a vagrancy, shiftless-
ness, and debasement that deserve all things that can be said against
them. The cure for this is more and better education, re-enforced by
the policy of every civilized land in the suppression of the devil-side
of society, that will ruin the greatest country under the sun.
But, below and beyond this open and evident work of education, I
see more clearly, every year, that the logic of the new Southern life
is all on the side of the final elevation of the Negro to the essential
rights and opportunities of American citizenship ; and, beyond, to
the generous co-operation with the nation in aiding him to make his
own best use of that supreme opportunity. We at the North are con¬
stantly misled by the press, which is a very poor representative of this
most important element of Southern life. We hear the superficial talk
and read of the disorder that is the inevitable accompaniment of
States in the transition from a great civil war to their final adjust¬
ment to the national life. An eminent educator of the South writes
me: " Ask a hundred men at the street corner what they think about
the education of the Negro, and seventy-five of them will demur, and
some of them will swear. The next day every man of them will vote
for the higher school tax that gives the Negro a better school-house
and the permanent establishment of his education." Our Southern
friends are no more logical than other portions of the country, and
15
the superficial life of all countries is constantly adjusting itself to the
logic of its undertow.. I can see, in more ways than I could explain,
even to a Northern community, that these people are " in the swim "
whose tide can only drift them off into regions of life which seem
almost impossible to them to-day.
The test of this drift is that, spite of all obstacles and embarrass¬
ments, there is, in every respectable Southern community, no real
hindrance to an intelligent, moral, industrious, and prudent Negro
family getting all out of American life that anybody expects, save that
social and,jn some localities, political recognition, that are the last
achievements of long periods of social evolution in national affairs.
In all essential respects, the Negro citizen is better off in the South
than in any Northern State. The outward opportunities for full asso¬
ciation with the white population in the North are, after all, of little
value in comparison with the substantial opportunity for becoming the
great laboring agricultural class and of capturing the field of mechan¬
ical and operative labor. It will be his own fault if he permits the
insolent naturalized foreign element that now dominates our Northern
industrial centres to elbow him off into a peasantry or a menial and
subordinate laboring population.
As I look at the way in which these seven millions of people are
gaining all the vital opportunities of life among the twelve millions of
their Anglo-Saxon neighbors, I am amazed at the way they seem to go
on, only half-conscious of what the rest of the world is saying about
them, " working out their own salvation " by the power that is in
them, in the only way by which an American people can finally
succeed. The only fit symbol of this mighty movement is the Miss¬
issippi River after it has become " the inland sea " of the Southland.
States and their peoples, Congress and the nation, scientists and
cranks, debate and experiment on the way to put the " Father of
Waters " in harness, to tie up this awful creature that holds the fate
of ten millions of people in its every-day whim. But all discourse,
legislation, and experiment, at last run against the question ; —What
will the Mississippi River do with us next week? So, while the
Southern people and the nation are wrestling with what they choose
to call the "race problem," this, inland, Southern human ocean,
searching and spreading and pushing into every nook and corner of
the low-land, is going on its way; and every deliverance of the
scientist, the socialist, and the statesman, brings up against some new
and unexpected thing that the Negro has really done. " How are
you getting on with your neighbors down here ?" said I to a deputa¬
tion of fine-looking colored men, who stepped out of a carriage and
presented me with a well-written address of welcome to the city of
Vicksburg. "Well, we used to have trouble; but we have finally
concluded the white man has come to stay, and we adjust ourselves
to that fact." The white man has indeed come to stay all over the
United States of America; but he will stay, not always as the white
man proposes, but as God Almighty disposes. And, wherever he
abides, he will finally be compelled, by the logic of American events,
to stay in peace and justice, in freedom and order, in Christian co¬
operation with all the great elements of republican society, shaped
from all the peoples that a beneficent Providence has called to abide
together in this, God's morning land.