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The Souls of Black Folk

by W. E. B. Du Bois · English · Gutenberg #408 · 418,303 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Souls of Black Folk

Author: W. E. B. Du Bois


        
Release date: January 1, 1996 [eBook #408]
                Most recently updated: September 26, 2026

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/408


*** 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
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




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.




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.

[Illustration]


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 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 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, 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 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 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.




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.

[Illustration]


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 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.

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, 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, 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 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 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.”

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
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 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 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
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 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.

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.




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.

[Illustration]


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 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.”

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 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 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.

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 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 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, 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.”




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.

[Illustration]


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 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 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 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 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 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 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.




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.

[Illustration]


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 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
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 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.”


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 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 is the tunic of
Atalanta pausing over her golden apples. Fly, my maiden, fly, for
yonder comes Hippomenes!




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).

[Illustration]


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?

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 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
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 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 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 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 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.

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 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, 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?




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.

[Illustration]


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 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 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 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 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 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 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.

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 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 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

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