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The Souls of Black Folk

by W. E. B. Du Bois.

January, 1996  [Etext #408]


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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
       Selected Bibliography



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.



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 Emanci-
pation, 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 pow-
erful 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.



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 em-
ployed; 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.  Never-
theless, 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 thereaf-
ter," 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 regu-
lations 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, cloth-
ing, 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 pecu-
liarly 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. How-
ard 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 exam-
ining the field of work.  A curious mess he looked upon: little
despotisms, communistic experiments, slavery, peonage, busi-
ness 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 ap-
pointed.  They were to hasten to their fields of work; seek
gradually to close relief establishments, and make the desti-
tute 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 hast-
ily 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 concep-
tion 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 ex-
traordinary 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 re-
enslavement.  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.  Mean-
time, however, the breach between Congress and the Presi-
dent 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 cogni-
zance.  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 com-
mander was now made also assistant commissioner.  It was
thus that the Freedmen's Bureau became a full-fledged gov-
ernment 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 mea-
sures as it thought necessary and proper for the accomplish-
ment 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 Amend-
ment 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 as-
sured and self-sustaining place in the body politic and eco-
nomic 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 instru-
ment 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 un-
thinkable, the maddest of experiments.

The agents that the Bureau could command varied all the
way from unselfish philanthropists to narrow-minded busy-
bodies and thieves; and even though it be true that the aver-
age was far better than the worst, it was the occasional fly
that helped spoil the ointment.

Then amid all crouched the freed slave, bewildered be-
tween 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 wel-
comed 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, hon-
est 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 Nig-
gers."  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 hospi-
tals 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 caelo in capacity and
character, where the personnel was continually changing, the
outcome was necessarily varied.  The largest element of suc-
cess 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 organiza-
tion 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 propri-
etors, 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 rea-
sonable ambition to become a landholder, which the nation
had all but categorically promised the freedmen--was des-
tined 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 han-
dling 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 claim-
ants, 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 Bu-
reau'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 impris-
oned, 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 institu-
tions 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 pur-
poses.  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 accom-
plished 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 meth-
ods 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, sup-
plemented 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 re-
sponsibilities, large control of moneys, and generally con-
spicuous 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 rec-
ommendation.  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 specula-
tion, 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 reputa-
tion, 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 disap-
peared; 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 un-
written 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 tremen-
dous 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 Eman-
cipation 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 in-
difference 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 impar-
tial 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 proteges 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.

Easily the most striking thing in the history of the American
Negro since 1876 is the ascendancy of Mr. Booker T. Wash-
ington.  It began at the time when war memories and ideals
were rapidly passing; a day of astonishing commercial devel-
opment was dawning; a sense of doubt and hesitation over-
took 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 in-
dustrial 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 Mission-
ary 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 indis-
solubly 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 ele-
ments 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 dif-
ferent ways: the radicals received it as a complete surrender
of the demand for civil and political equality; the conserva-
tives, 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 one-
ness 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 unquestion-
ing 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 cour-
tesy 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 ele-
ments 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 acknowl-
edge 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, amount-
ing at times to bitterness, and even today continuing strong
and insistent even though largely silenced in outward expres-
sion by the public opinion of the nation.  Some of this opposi-
tion 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 lis-
teners.  Honest and earnest criticism from those whose inter-
ests 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 educa-
tion 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 influ-
ence 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 con-
trolling 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 eman-
cipation, the great form of Frederick Douglass, the greatest of
American Negro leaders, still led the host.  Self-assertion,
especially in political lines, was the 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 politi-
cal 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 opin-
ion, the Negroes began to recognize Mr. Washington's lead-
ership; and the voice of criticism was hushed.

Mr. Washington represents in Negro thought the old atti-
tude 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. Washing-
ton'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. Washing-
ton'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 develop-
ing 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 in-
volved 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 Associ-
ated Press to the Church of Christ.  They advocate, with Mr.
Washington, a broad system of Negro common schools sup-
plemented by thorough industrial training; but they are sur-
prised 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 univer-
sity, 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 "At-
lanta Compromise" in its broadest interpretation; they recog-
nize, 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 indis-
criminate 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 fel-
lows 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 legiti-
mate 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 them-
selves, a responsibility to the struggling masses, a responsi-
bility to the darker races of men whose future depends so
largely on this American experiment, but especially a respon-
sibility 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 reconcilia-
tion between the North and South after the frightful difference
of a generation ago ought to be a source of deep congratula-
tion 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 indis-
criminate 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 develop-
ment, 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 pres-
sure 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 in-
veigh 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 develop-
ment 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 verkunden,
Wahle sie die frei von Sunden,
Steh'n in Deinem ew'gen Haus!
Deine Geister sende aus!
Die Unsterblichen, die Reinen,
Die nicht fuhlen, die nicht weinen!
Nicht die zarte Jungfrau wahle,
Nicht der Hirtin weiche Seele!

SCHILLER.


Once upon a time I taught school in the hills 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 Caro-
linas, 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 fa-
tal, 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 sol-
emn.  '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, unfa-
thered 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 possi-
ble, I put Cicero "pro Archia Poeta" into the simplest En-
glish with local applications, and usually convinced them--for
a week or so.

On Friday nights I often went home with some of 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 won-
der, 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 to-
gether; 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 con-
tent, 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 thought-
less, flushed with the passion of youth, bestowed herself on
the tempter, and brought home a nameless child.  Josie shiv-
ered 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 daugh-
ter 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 mourn-
fully 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 impa-
tience 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 barba-
rism about them that I liked.  They were never vulgar, never
immoral, but rather rough and primitive, with an unconven-
tionality 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.


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 reclame,--and yet with real ear-
nestness, 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, serf-
dom, 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 incor-
ruptible 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 know-
ing, to regard dollars as the be-all and end-all of life?  What if
to the Mammonism of America be added the rising Mam-
monism 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, spar-
ingly 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-sav-
ing 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 knowl-
edge 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 know-
ing, 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 knowl-
edge of life, an adjustment which forms the secret of civiliza-
tion.  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 command-
ments, 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 abun-
dance 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 nig-
gardly 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, Vander-
bilt, and the others--fit to live; let us build, too, the Negro
universities:--Fisk, whose foundation was ever broad; How-
ard, 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 knowl-
edge 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 philoso-
phers, 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 ap-
ples 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 unham-
pered 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 KHAYYAM (FITZGERALD).


From the shimmering swirl of waters where many, many
thoughts ago the slave-ship first saw the square tower of
Jamestown, have flowed down to our day three streams of
thinking: one swollen from the larger world here and over-
seas, 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 clown-
ish, simple creature, at times even lovable within its limita-
tions, 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 deca-
dence?  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 coordina-
tion 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 crys-
tallized it into harsh law and harsher custom; while the mar-
vellous 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 practi-
cal 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 preju-
dice, 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 time-
liness.  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 develop-
ment, 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 civili-
zation 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 suffi-
cient 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 be-
cause 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 enthusi-
asm 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 impos-
sible, 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 col-
leges; 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 asy-
lums 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 back-
ward 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 establish-
ment 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 institu-
tions 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 gram-
mar 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 train-
ing by giving teachers and leaders the best practicable train-
ing; 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 civili-
zation 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 instruc-
tion, and graduating without sensible aim or valuable oc-
cupation for their future.  The whole scheme has proved a
waste of time, efforts, and the money of the state."

While most fair-minded men would recognize this as ex-
treme 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 stu-
dents 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 open-
ness 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 thor-
oughly 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 un-
touched.  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 stu-
dents 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 insti-
tutions 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,--


   "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 sympa-
thy, 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 appre-
ciable 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 gradu-
ates, 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 suc-
cess.  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 suc-
ceeded in getting answers from nearly two-thirds of the liv-
ing.  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 institu-
tions, 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 use-
fulness.  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 determi-
nation to succeed in the face of bitter difficulties than among
Negro college-bred men.  They have, to be sure, their propor-
tion 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 re-
moved 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.  Col-
ored 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 prevent-
ing 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, minis-
ters, 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 civi-
lized, 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 si-
lently 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 Ameri-
can civilization will triumph.  So far as white men are con-
cerned, 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 lead-
ers, 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 draw-
ers 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 pre-
clude the South from being, as it so largely is, simply an
armed camp for intimidating black folk.  Such waste of energy
cannot he 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 mar-
riage 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 inef-
faceable 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-refine-
ment?  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 afore-
time 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 gra-
ciously 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.


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 vil-
lages, 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 thou-
sand 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 Anderson-
ville, and, turning suddenly at Albany, the county-seat, hur-
ries 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 strag-
gling 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 planta-
tion 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 en-
sconced 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 magno-
lias, 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 school-
house 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.  Oppo-
site 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 na-
ked 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, how-
ever, 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 luxuri-
ance 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 Chickasaw-
hatchee, 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, some-
thing 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 mean-
ing 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 black-
smith 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 man-
ager 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.

Immigrants are heirs 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 compa-
nies, mills and factories; most failed, and foreigners fell heir.
It is a beautiful land, this Dougherty, west of the Flint.  The
forests are wonderful, the solemn pines have disappeared,
and this is the "Oakey Woods," with its wealth of hickories,
beeches, oaks and palmettos.  But a pall of debt hangs over
the beautiful land; the merchants are in debt to the wholesal-
ers, 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 disap-
pear.  Rows of old cabins appear filled with renters and
laborers,--cheerless, bare, and dirty, for the most part, al-
though 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 migra-
tion.  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 la-
bored 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 in-
quire after the black boy in Albany, whom it was said a
policeman had shot and killed for loud talking on the side-
walk.  And then he said slowly: "Let a white man touch me,
and he dies; I don'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 imper-
turbable gravity that seemed almost suspicious.  Then he con-
tinued, "My mule died last week,"--a calamity in this land
equal to a devastating fire in town,--"but a white man
loaned me another."  Then he added, eyeing us, "Oh, I gets
along with white folks."  We turned the conversation.  "Bears?
deer?" he answered, "well, I should say there were," and he
let fly a string of brave oaths, as he told hunting-tales of the
swamp.  We left him standing still in the middle of the road
looking after us, and yet apparently not noticing us.

The Whistle place, which includes his bit of land, was
bought soon after the war by an English syndicate, the "Dixie
Cotton and Corn Company."  A marvellous deal of style their
factor put on, with his servants and coach-and-six; so much
so that the concern soon landed in inextricable bankruptcy.
Nobody lives in the old house now, but a man comes each
winter out of the North and collects his high rents.  I know not
which are the more touching,--such old empty houses, or the
homes of the masters' sons.  Sad and bitter tales lie hidden
back of those white doors,--tales of poverty, of struggle, of
disappointment.  A revolution such as that of '63 is a terrible
thing; they that rose rich in the morning often slept in pau-
pers' beds.  Beggars and vulgar speculators rose to rule over
them, and their children went astray.  See yonder sad-colored
house, with its cabins and fences and glad crops!  It is not
glad within; last month the prodigal son of the struggling
father wrote home from the city for money.  Money!  Where
was it to come from?  And so the son rose in the night and
killed his baby, and killed his wife, and shot himself dead.
And the world passed on.

I remember wheeling around a bend in the road beside a
graceful bit of forest and a singing brook.  A long low house
faced us, with porch and flying pillars, great oaken door, and
a broad lawn shining in the evening sun.  But the window-
panes were gone, the pillars were worm-eaten, and the moss-
grown roof was falling in.  Half curiously I peered through the
unhinged door, and saw where, on the wall across the hall,
was written in once gay letters a faded "Welcome."

Quite a contrast to the southwestern part of Dougherty
County is the northwest.  Soberly timbered in oak and pine, it
has none of that half-tropical luxuriance of the southwest.
Then, too, there are fewer signs of a romantic past, and more
of systematic modern land-grabbing and money-getting.  White
people are more in evidence here, and farmer and hired labor
replace to some extent the absentee landlord and rack-rented
tenant.  The crops have neither the luxuriance of the richer
land nor the signs of neglect so often seen, and there were
fences and meadows here and there.  Most of this land was
poor, and beneath the notice of the slave-baron, before the
war.  Since then his poor relations and foreign immigrants
have seized it.  The returns of the farmer are too small to
allow much for wages, and yet he will not sell off small
farms.  There is the Negro Sanford; he has worked fourteen
years as overseer on the Ladson place, and "paid out enough
for fertilizers to have bought a farm," but the owner will not
sell off a few acres.

Two children--a boy and a girl--are hoeing sturdily in the
fields on the farm where Corliss works.  He is smooth-faced
and brown, and is fencing up his pigs.  He used to run a
successful cotton-gin, but the Cotton Seed Oil Trust has
forced the price of ginning so low that he says it hardly pays
him.  He points out a stately old house over the way as the
home of "Pa Willis."  We eagerly ride over, for "Pa Willis"
was the tall and powerful black Moses who led the Negroes
for a generation, and led them well.  He was a Baptist preacher,
and when he died, two thousand black people followed him
to the grave; and now they preach his funeral sermon each
year.  His widow lives here,--a weazened, sharp-featured
little woman, who curtsied quaintly as we greeted her.  Fur-
ther on lives Jack Delson, the most prosperous Negro farmer
in the county.  It is a joy to meet him,--a great broad-shoul-
dered, handsome black man, intelligent and jovial.  Six hun-
dred and fifty acres he owns, and has eleven black tenants.  A
neat and tidy home nestled in a flower-garden, and a little
store stands beside it.

We pass the Munson place, where a plucky white widow is
renting and struggling; and the eleven hundred acres of the
Sennet plantation, with its Negro overseer.  Then the character
of the farms begins to change.  Nearly all the lands belong to
Russian Jews; the overseers are white, and the cabins are bare
board-houses scattered here and there.  The rents are high, and
day-laborers and "contract" hands abound.  It is a keen, hard
struggle for living here, and few have time to talk.  Tired with
the long ride, we gladly drive into Gillonsville.  It is a silent
cluster of farmhouses standing on the crossroads, with one of
its stores closed and the other kept by a Negro preacher.  They
tell great tales of busy times at Gillonsville before all the
railroads came to Albany; now it is chiefly a memory.  Riding
down the street, we stop at the preacher's and seat ourselves
before the door.  It was one of those scenes one cannot soon
forget:--a wide, low, little house, whose motherly roof reached
over and sheltered a snug little porch.  There we sat, after the
long hot drive, drinking cool water,--the talkative little store-
keeper who is my daily companion; the silent old black
woman patching pantaloons and saying never a word; the
ragged picture of helpless misfortune who called in just to see
the preacher; and finally the neat matronly preacher's wife,
plump, yellow, and intelligent.  "Own land?" said the wife;
"well, only this house."  Then she added quietly.  "We did
buy seven hundred acres across up yonder, and paid for it;
but they cheated us out of it.  Sells was the owner."  "Sells!"
echoed the ragged misfortune, who was leaning against the
balustrade and listening, "he's a regular cheat.  I worked for
him thirty-seven days this spring, and he paid me in card-
board checks which were to be cashed at the end of the
month.  But he never cashed them,--kept putting me off.
Then the sheriff came and took my mule and corn and furni-
ture--" "Furniture?  But furniture is exempt from seizure by
law."  "Well, he took it just the same," said the hard-faced
man.






VIII

Of the Quest of the Golden Fleece

But the Brute said in his breast, "Till the mills I grind have ceased,
The riches shall be dust of dust, dry ashes be the feast!


   "On the strong and cunning few

   Cynic favors I will strew;
I will stuff their maw with overplus until their spirit dies;

From the patient and the low

I will take the joys they know;
    They shall hunger after vanities and still an-hungered go.
Madness shall be on the people, ghastly jealousies arise;
Brother's blood shall cry on brother up the dead and empty skies.

WILLIAM VAUGHN MOODY.


Have you ever seen a cotton-field white with harvest,--its
golden fleece hovering above the black earth like a silvery
cloud edged with dark green, its bold white signals waving
like the foam of billows from Carolina to Texas across that
Black and human Sea?  I have sometimes half suspected that
here the winged ram Chrysomallus left that Fleece after which
Jason and his Argonauts went vaguely wandering into the
shadowy East three thousand years ago; and certainly one
might frame a pretty and not far-fetched analogy of witchery
and dragons' teeth, and blood and armed men, between the
ancient and the modern quest of the Golden Fleece in the
Black Sea.

And now the golden fleece is found; not only found, but,
in its birthplace, woven.  For the hum of the cotton-mills is
the newest and most significant thing in the New South
to-day.  All through the Carolinas and Georgia, away down to
Mexico, rise these gaunt red buildings, bare and homely, and
yet so busy and noisy withal that they scarce seem to belong
to the slow and sleepy land.  Perhaps they sprang from drag-
ons' teeth.  So the Cotton Kingdom still lives; the world still
bows beneath her sceptre.  Even the markets that once defied
the parvenu have crept one by one across the seas, and then
slowly and reluctantly, but surely, have started toward the
Black Belt.

To be sure, there are those who wag their heads knowingly
and tell us that the capital of the Cotton Kingdom has moved
from the Black to the White Belt,--that the Negro of to-day
raises not more than half of the cotton crop.  Such men forget
that the cotton crop has doubled, and more than doubled,
since the era of slavery, and that, even granting their con-
tention, the Negro is still supreme in a Cotton Kingdom
larger than that on which the Confederacy builded its hopes.
So the Negro forms to-day one of the chief figures in a great
world-industry; and this, for its own sake, and in the light of
historic interest, makes the field-hands of the cotton country
worth studying.

We seldom study the condition of the Negro to-day hon-
estly and carefully.  It is so much easier to assume that we
know it all.  Or perhaps, having already reached conclusions
in our own minds, we are loth to have them disturbed by
facts.  And yet how little we really know of these millions,--of
their daily lives and longings, of their homely joys and
sorrows, of their real shortcomings and the meaning of their
crimes!  All this we can only learn by intimate contact with the
masses, and not by wholesale arguments covering millions
separate in time and space, and differing widely in training
and culture.  To-day, then, my reader, let us turn our faces to
the Black Belt of Georgia and seek simply to know the
condition of the black farm-laborers of one county there.

Here in 1890 lived ten thousand Negroes and two thousand
whites.  The country is rich, yet the people are poor.  The
keynote of the Black Belt is debt; not commercial credit, but
debt in the sense of continued inability on the part of the
mass of the population to make income cover expense.  This
is the direct heritage of the South from the wasteful econo-
mies of the slave regime; but it was emphasized and brought
to a crisis by the Emancipation of the slaves.  In 1860,
Dougherty County had six thousand slaves, worth at least two
and a half millions of dollars; its farms were estimated at
three millions,--making five and a half millions of property,
the value of which depended largely on the slave system, and
on the speculative demand for land once marvellously rich but
already partially devitalized by careless and exhaustive cul-
ture.  The war then meant a financial crash; in place of the
five and a half millions of 1860, there remained in 1870 only
farms valued at less than two millions.  With this came in-
creased competition in cotton culture from the rich lands of
Texas; a steady fall in the normal price of cotton followed,
from about fourteen cents a pound in 1860 until it reached
four cents in 1898.  Such a financial revolution was it that
involved the owners of the cotton-belt in debt.  And if things
went ill with the master, how fared it with the man?

The plantations of Dougherty County in slavery days were
not as imposing and aristocratic as those of Virginia.  The Big
House was smaller and usually one-storied, and sat very near
the slave cabins.  Sometimes these cabins stretched off on
either side like wings; sometimes only on one side, forming a
double row, or edging the road that turned into the plantation
from the main thoroughfare.  The form and disposition of the
laborers' cabins throughout the Black Belt is to-day the same
as in slavery days.  Some live in the self-same cabins, others
in cabins rebuilt on the sites of the old.  All are sprinkled in
little groups over the face of the land, centering about some
dilapidated Big House where the head-tenant or agent lives.
The general character and arrangement of these dwellings
remains on the whole unaltered.  There were in the county,
outside the corporate town of Albany, about fifteen hundred
Negro families in 1898.  Out of all these, only a single family
occupied a house with seven rooms; only fourteen have five
rooms or more.  The mass live in one- and two-room homes.

The size and arrangements of a people's homes are no
unfair index of their condition.  If, then, we inquire more
carefully into these Negro homes, we find much that is
unsatisfactory.  All over the face of the land is the one-room
cabin,--now standing in the shadow of the Big House, now
staring at the dusty road, now rising dark and sombre amid
the green of the cotton-fields.  It is nearly always old and bare,
built of rough boards, and neither plastered nor ceiled.  Light
and ventilation are supplied by the single door and by the
square hole in the wall with its wooden shutter.  There is no
glass, porch, or ornamentation without.  Within is a fireplace,
black and smoky, and usually unsteady with age.  A bed or
two, a table, a wooden chest, and a few chairs compose the
furniture; while a stray show-bill or a newspaper makes up
the decorations for the walls.  Now and then one may find
such a cabin kept scrupulously neat, with merry steaming
fireplaces and hospitable door; but the majority are dirty and
dilapidated, smelling of eating and sleeping, poorly venti-
lated, and anything but homes.

Above all, the cabins are crowded.  We have come to associ-
ate crowding with homes in cities almost exclusively.  This is
primarily because we have so little accurate knowledge of
country life.  Here in Dougherty County one may find families
of eight and ten occupying one or two rooms, and for every
ten rooms of house accommodation for the Negroes there are
twenty-five persons.  The worst tenement abominations of
New York do not have above twenty-two persons for every
ten rooms.  Of course, one small, close room in a city,
without a yard, is in many respects worse than the larger
single country room.  In other respects it is better; it has glass
windows, a decent chimney, and a trustworthy floor.  The
single great advantage of the Negro peasant is that he may
spend most of his life outside his hovel, in the open fields.

There are four chief causes of these wretched homes: First,
long custom born of slavery has assigned such homes to
Negroes; white laborers would be offered better accommoda-
tions, and might, for that and similar reasons, give better
work.  Secondly, the Negroes, used to such accommodations,
do not as a rule demand better; they do not know what better
houses mean.  Thirdly, the landlords as a class have not yet
come to realize that it is a good business investment to raise
the standard of living among labor by slow and judicious
methods; that a Negro laborer who demands three rooms and
fifty cents a day would give more efficient work and leave a
larger profit than a discouraged toiler herding his family in
one room and working for thirty cents.  Lastly, among such
conditions of life there are few incentives to make the laborer
become a better farmer.  If he is ambitious, he moves to town
or tries other labor; as a tenant-farmer his outlook is almost
hopeless, and following it as a makeshift, he takes the house
that is given him without protest.

In such homes, then, these Negro peasants live.  The fami-
lies are both small and large; there are many single tenants,
--widows and bachelors, and remnants of broken groups.
The system of labor and the size of the houses both tend to
the breaking up of family groups: the grown children go away
as contract hands or migrate to town, the sister goes into
service; and so one finds many families with hosts of babies,
and many newly married couples, but comparatively few
families with half-grown and grown sons and daughters.  The
average size of Negro families has undoubtedly decreased
since the war, primarily from economic stress.  In Russia over
a third of the bridegrooms and over half the brides are under
twenty; the same was true of the antebellum Negroes.  To-
day, however, very few of the boys and less than a fifth of
the Negro girls under twenty are married.  The young men
marry between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-five; the
young women between twenty and thirty.  Such postponement
is due to the difficulty of earning sufficient to rear and
support a family; and it undoubtedly leads, in the country
districts, to sexual immorality.  The form of this immorality,
however, is very seldom that of prostitution, and less fre-
quently that of illegitimacy than one would imagine.  Rather,
it takes the form of separation and desertion after a family
group has been formed.  The number of separated persons is
thirty-five to the thousand,--a very large number.  It would
of course be unfair to compare this number with divorce
statistics, for many of these separated women are in reality
widowed, were the truth known, and in other cases the
separation is not permanent.  Nevertheless, here lies the seat
of greatest moral danger.  There is little or no prostitution
among these Negroes, and over three-fourths of the families, as
found by house-to-house investigation, deserve to be classed
as decent people with considerable regard for female chastity.
To be sure, the ideas of the mass would not suit New
England, and there are many loose habits and notions.  Yet
the rate of illegitimacy is undoubtedly lower than in Austria
or Italy, and the women as a class are modest.  The plague-
spot in sexual relations is easy marriage and easy separation.
This is no sudden development, nor the fruit of Emancipa-
tion.  It is the plain heritage from slavery.  In those days Sam,
with his master's consent, "took up" with Mary.  No cere-
mony was necessary, and in the busy life of the great planta-
tions of the Black Belt it was usually dispensed with.  If now
the master needed Sam's work in another plantation or in
another part of the same plantation, or if he took a notion to
sell the slave, Sam's married life with Mary was usually
unceremoniously broken, and then it was clearly to the mas-
ter's interest to have both of them take new mates.  This
widespread custom of two centuries has not been eradicated
in thirty years.  To-day Sam's grandson "takes up" with a
woman without license or ceremony; they live together de-
cently and honestly, and are, to all intents and purposes, man
and wife.  Sometimes these unions are never broken until
death; but in too many cases family quarrels, a roving spirit,
a rival suitor, or perhaps more frequently the hopeless battle
to support a family, lead to separation, and a broken house-
hold is the result.  The Negro church has done much to stop
this practice, and now most marriage ceremonies are per-
formed by the pastors.  Nevertheless, the evil is still deep
seated, and only a general raising of the standard of living
will finally cure it.

Looking now at the county black population as a whole, it
is fair to characterize it as poor and ignorant.  Perhaps ten per
cent compose the well-to-do and the best of the laborers,
while at least nine per cent are thoroughly lewd and vicious.
The rest, over eighty per cent, are poor and ignorant, fairly
honest and well meaning, plodding, and to a degree shiftless,
with some but not great sexual looseness.  Such class lines are
by no means fixed; they vary, one might almost say, with the
price of cotton.  The degree of ignorance cannot easily be
expressed.  We may say, for instance, that nearly two-thirds
of them cannot read or write.  This but partially expresses the
fact.  They are ignorant of the world about them, of modern
economic organization, of the function of government, of
individual worth and possibilities,--of nearly all those things
which slavery in self-defence had to keep them from learning.
Much that the white boy imbibes from his earliest social
atmosphere forms the puzzling problems of the black boy's
mature years.  America is not another word for Opportunity
to all her sons.

It is easy for us to lose ourselves in details in endeavoring
to grasp and comprehend the real condition of a mass of human
beings.  We often forget that each unit in the mass is a
throbbing human soul.  Ignorant it may be, and poverty stricken,
black and curious in limb and ways and thought; and yet it
loves and hates, it toils and tires, it laughs and weeps its
bitter tears, and looks in vague and awful longing at the grim
horizon of its life,--all this, even as you and I. These black
thousands are not in reality lazy; they are improvident and
careless; they insist on breaking the monotony of toil with a
glimpse at the great town-world on Saturday; they have their
loafers and their rascals; but the great mass of them work
continuously and faithfully for a return, and under circum-
stances that would call forth equal voluntary effort from few
if any other modern laboring class.  Over eighty-eight per cent
of them--men, women, and children--are farmers.  Indeed,
this is almost the only industry.  Most of the children get their
schooling after the "crops are laid by," and very few there
are that stay in school after the spring work has begun.
Child-labor is to be found here in some of its worst phases, as
fostering ignorance and stunting physical development.  With
the grown men of the county there is little variety in work:
thirteen hundred are farmers, and two hundred are laborers,
teamsters, etc., including twenty-four artisans, ten merchants,
twenty-one preachers, and four teachers.  This narrowness of
life reaches its maximum among the women: thirteen hundred
and fifty of these are farm laborers, one hundred are servants
and washerwomen, leaving sixty-five housewives, eight teach-
ers, and six seamstresses.

Among this people there is no leisure class.  We often forget
that in the United States over half the youth and adults are not
in the world earning incomes, but are making homes, learn-
ing of the world, or resting after the heat of the strife.  But
here ninety-six per cent are toiling; no one with leisure to turn
the bare and cheerless cabin into a home, no old folks to sit
beside the fire and hand down traditions of the past; little of
careless happy childhood and dreaming youth.  The dull mo-
notony of daily toil is broken only by the gayety of the
thoughtless and the Saturday trip to town.  The toil, like all
farm toil, is monotonous, and here there are little machinery
and few tools to relieve its burdensome drudgery.  But with all
this, it is work in the pure open air, and this is something in a
day when fresh air is scarce.

The land on the whole is still fertile, despite long abuse.
For nine or ten months in succession the crops will come if
asked: garden vegetables in April, grain in May, melons in
June and July, hay in August, sweet potatoes in September,
and cotton from then to Christmas.  And yet on two-thirds of
the land there is but one crop, and that leaves the toilers in
debt.  Why is this?

Away down the Baysan road, where the broad flat fields
are flanked by great oak forests, is a plantation; many thou-
sands of acres it used to run, here and there, and beyond the
great wood.  Thirteen hundred human beings here obeyed the
call of one,--were his in body, and largely in soul.  One of
them lives there yet,--a short, stocky man, his dull-brown
face seamed and drawn, and his tightly curled hair gray-
white.  The crops?  Just tolerable, he said; just tolerable.  Get-
ting on?  No--he wasn't getting on at all.  Smith of Albany
"furnishes" him, and his rent is eight hundred pounds of
cotton.  Can't make anything at that.  Why didn't he buy land!
Humph!  Takes money to buy land.  And he turns away.  Free!
The most piteous thing amid all the black ruin of war-time,
amid the broken fortunes of the masters, the blighted hopes of
mothers and maidens, and the fall of an empire,--the most
piteous thing amid all this was the black freedman who threw
down his hoe because the world called him free.  What did
such a mockery of freedom mean?  Not a cent of money, not
an inch of land, not a mouthful of victuals,--not even owner-
ship of the rags on his back.  Free!  On Saturday, once or
twice a month, the old master, before the war, used to dole
out bacon and meal to his Negroes.  And after the first flush
of freedom wore off, and his true helplessness dawned on the
freedman, he came back and picked up his hoe, and old
master still doled out his bacon and meal.  The legal form of
service was theoretically far different; in practice, task-work
or "cropping" was substituted for daily toil in gangs; and the
slave gradually became a metayer, or tenant on shares, in
name, but a laborer with indeterminate wages in fact.

Still the price of cotton fell, and gradually the landlords
deserted their plantations, and the reign of the merchant began.
The merchant of the Black Belt is a curious institution,--part
banker, part landlord, part banker, and part despot.  His store,
which used most frequently to stand at the cross-roads and be-
come the centre of a weekly village, has now moved to town;
and thither the Negro tenant follows him.  The merchant keeps
everything,--clothes and shoes, coffee and sugar, pork and
meal, canned and dried goods, wagons and ploughs, seed and
fertilizer,--and what he has not in stock he can give you an
order for at the store across the way.  Here, then, comes the ten-
ant, Sam Scott, after he has contracted with some absent land-
lord's agent for hiring forty acres of land; he fingers his hat
nervously until the merchant finishes his morning chat with
Colonel Saunders, and calls out, "Well, Sam, what do you
want?"  Sam wants him to "furnish" him,--i.e., to advance him
food and clothing for the year, and perhaps seed and tools, until
his crop is raised and sold.  If Sam seems a favorable subject,
he and the merchant go to a lawyer, and Sam executes a chattel
mortgage on his mule and wagon in return for seed and a week's
rations.  As soon as the green cotton-leaves appear above the
ground, another mortgage is given on the "crop."  Every
Saturday, or at longer intervals, Sam calls upon the merchant
for his "rations"; a family of five usually gets about thirty
pounds of fat side-pork and a couple of bushels of cornmeal a
month.  Besides this, clothing and shoes must be furnished; if
Sam or his family is sick, there are orders on the druggist and
doctor; if the mule wants shoeing, an order on the black-
smith, etc.  If Sam is a hard worker and crops promise well,
he is often encouraged to buy more,--sugar, extra clothes,
perhaps a buggy.  But he is seldom encouraged to save.  When
cotton rose to ten cents last fall, the shrewd merchants of
Dougherty County sold a thousand buggies in one season,
mostly to black men.

The security offered for such transactions--a crop and
chattel mortgage--may at first seem slight.  And, indeed, the
merchants tell many a true tale of shiftlessness and cheating;
of cotton picked at night, mules disappearing, and tenants
absconding.  But on the whole the merchant of the Black Belt
is the most prosperous man in the section.  So skilfully and so
closely has he drawn the bonds of the law about the tenant,
that the black man has often simply to choose between pau-
perism and crime; he "waives" all homestead exemptions in
his contract; he cannot touch his own mortgaged crop, which
the laws put almost in the full control of the land-owner and
of the merchant.  When the crop is growing the merchant
watches it like a hawk; as soon as it is ready for market he
takes possession of it, sells it, pays the landowner his rent,
subtracts his bill for supplies, and if, as sometimes happens,
there is anything left, he hands it over to the black serf for his
Christmas celebration.

The direct result of this system is an all-cotton scheme of
agriculture and the continued bankruptcy of the tenant.  The
currency of the Black Belt is cotton.  It is a crop always
salable for ready money, not usually subject to great yearly
fluctuations in price, and one which the Negroes know how
to raise.  The landlord therefore demands his rent in cotton,
and the merchant will accept mortgages on no other crop.
There is no use asking the black tenant, then, to diversify his
crops,--he cannot under this system.  Moreover, the system is
bound to bankrupt the tenant.  I remember once meeting a
little one-mule wagon on the River road.  A young black
fellow sat in it driving listlessly, his elbows on his knees.  His
dark-faced wife sat beside him, stolid, silent.

"Hello!" cried my driver,--he has a most imprudent way
of addressing these people, though they seem used to it,
--"what have you got there?"

"Meat and meal," answered the man, stopping.  The meat
lay uncovered in the bottom of the wagon,--a great thin side
of fat pork covered with salt; the meal was in a white bushel
bag.

"What did you pay for that meat?"

"Ten cents a pound."  It could have been bought for six or
seven cents cash.

"And the meal?"

"Two dollars."  One dollar and ten cents is the cash price
in town.  Here was a man paying five dollars for goods which
he could have bought for three dollars cash, and raised for
one dollar or one dollar and a half.

Yet it is not wholly his fault.  The Negro farmer started
behind,--started in debt.  This was not his choosing, but the
crime of this happy-go-lucky nation which goes blundering
along with its Reconstruction tragedies, its Spanish war inter-
ludes and Philippine matinees, just as though God really were
dead.  Once in debt, it is no easy matter for a whole race to
emerge.

In the year of low-priced cotton, 1898, out of three hun-
dred tenant families one hundred and seventy-five ended their
year's work in debt to the extent of fourteen thousand dollars;
fifty cleared nothing, and the remaining seventy-five made a
total profit of sixteen hundred dollars.  The net indebtedness
of the black tenant families of the whole county must have
been at least sixty thousand dollars.  In a more prosperous
year the situation is far better; but on the average the majority
of tenants end the year even, or in debt, which means that
they work for board and clothes.  Such an economic organiza-
tion is radically wrong.  Whose is the blame?

The underlying causes of this situation are complicated but
discernible.  And one of the chief, outside the carelessness of
the nation in letting the slave start with nothing, is the
widespread opinion among the merchants and employers of
the Black Belt that only by the slavery of debt can the Negro
be kept at work.  Without doubt, some pressure was necessary
at the beginning of the free-labor system to keep the listless
and lazy at work; and even to-day the mass of the Negro
laborers need stricter guardianship than most Northern labor-
ers.  Behind this honest and widespread opinion dishonesty
and cheating of the ignorant laborers have a good chance to
take refuge.  And to all this must be added the obvious fact
that a slave ancestry and a system of unrequited toil has not
improved the efficiency or temper of the mass of black
laborers.  Nor is this peculiar to Sambo; it has in history been
just as true of John and Hans, of Jacques and Pat, of all
ground-down peasantries.  Such is the situation of the mass of
the Negroes in the Black Belt to-day; and they are thinking
about it.  Crime, and a cheap and dangerous socialism, are the
inevitable results of this pondering.  I see now that ragged
black man sitting on a log, aimlessly whittling a stick.  He
muttered to me with the murmur of many ages, when he said:
"White man sit down whole year; Nigger work day and night
and make crop; Nigger hardly gits bread and meat; white man
sittin' down gits all. It's wrong." And what do the better
classes of Negroes do to improve their situation?  One of two
things: if any way possible, they buy land; if not, they
migrate to town.  Just as centuries ago it was no easy thing for
the serf to escape into the freedom of town-life, even so
to-day there are hindrances laid in the way of county laborers.
In considerable parts of all the Gulf States, and especially in
Mississippi, Louisiana, and Arkansas, the Negroes on the
plantations in the back-country districts are still held at forced
labor practically without wages.  Especially is this true in
districts where the farmers are composed of the more ignorant
class of poor whites, and the Negroes are beyond the reach of
schools and intercourse with their advancing fellows.  If such
a peon should run away, the sheriff, elected by white suf-
frage, can usually be depended on to catch the fugitive, return
him, and ask no questions.  If he escape to another county, a
charge of petty thieving, easily true, can be depended upon to
secure his return.  Even if some unduly officious person insist
upon a trial, neighborly comity will probably make his con-
viction sure, and then the labor due the county can easily be
bought by the master.  Such a system is impossible in the
more civilized parts of the South, or near the large towns and
cities; but in those vast stretches of land beyond the telegraph
and the newspaper the spirit of the Thirteenth Amendment is
sadly broken.  This represents the lowest economic depths of
the black American peasant; and in a study of the rise and
condition of the Negro freeholder we must trace his economic
progress from the modern serfdom.

Even in the better-ordered country districts of the South the
free movement of agricultural laborers is hindered by the
migration-agent laws.  The "Associated Press" recently in-
formed the world of the arrest of a young white man in
Southern Georgia who represented the "Atlantic Naval Sup-
plies Company," and who "was caught in the act of enticing
hands from the turpentine farm of Mr. John Greer."  The
crime for which this young man was arrested is taxed five
hundred dollars for each county in which the employment
agent proposes to gather laborers for work outside the State.
Thus the Negroes' ignorance of the labor-market outside his
own vicinity is increased rather than diminished by the laws
of nearly every Southern State.

Similar to such measures is the unwritten law of the back
districts and small towns of the South, that the character of all
Negroes unknown to the mass of the community must be
vouched for by some white man.  This is really a revival of
the old Roman idea of the patron under whose protection the
new-made freedman was put.  In many instances this system
has been of great good to the Negro, and very often under the
protection and guidance of the former master's family, or
other white friends, the freedman progressed in wealth and
morality.  But the same system has in other cases resulted in
the refusal of whole communities to recognize the right of a
Negro to change his habitation and to be master of his own
fortunes.  A black stranger in Baker County, Georgia, for
instance, is liable to be stopped anywhere on the public
highway and made to state his business to the satisfaction of
any white interrogator.  If he fails to give a suitable answer, or
seems too independent or "sassy," he may be arrested or
summarily driven away.

Thus it is that in the country districts of the South, by
written or unwritten law, peonage, hindrances to the migra-
tion of labor, and a system of white patronage exists over
large areas.  Besides this, the chance for lawless oppression
and illegal exactions is vastly greater in the country than in
the city, and nearly all the more serious race disturbances of
the last decade have arisen from disputes in the count be-
tween master and man,--as, for instance, the Sam Hose
affair.  As a result of such a situation, there arose, first, the
Black Belt; and, second, the Migration to Town.  The Black
Belt was not, as many assumed, a movement toward fields of
labor under more genial climatic conditions; it was primarily
a huddling for self-protection,--a massing of the black popu-
lation for mutual defence in order to secure the peace and
tranquillity necessary to economic advance.  This movement
took place between Emancipation and 1880, and only par-
tially accomplished the desired results.  The rush to town
since 1880 is the counter-movement of men disappointed in
the economic opportunities of the Black Belt.

In Dougherty County, Georgia, one can see easily the
results of this experiment in huddling for protection.  Only ten
per cent of the adult population was born in the county, and
yet the blacks outnumber the whites four or five to one.  There
is undoubtedly a security to the blacks in their very numbers,--a
personal freedom from arbitrary treatment, which makes hun-
dreds of laborers cling to Dougherty in spite of low wages
and economic distress.  But a change is coming, and slowly
but surely even here the agricultural laborers are drifting to
town and leaving the broad acres behind.  Why is this?  Why
do not the Negroes become land-owners, and build up the
black landed peasantry, which has for a generation and more
been the dream of philanthropist and statesman?

To the car-window sociologist, to the man who seeks to
understand and know the South by devoting the few leisure
hours of a holiday trip to unravelling the snarl of centuries,--to
such men very often the whole trouble with the black field-
hand may be summed up by Aunt Ophelia's word, "Shift-
less!"  They have noted repeatedly scenes like one I saw last
summer.  We were riding along the highroad to town at the
close of a long hot day.  A couple of young black fellows
passed us in a muleteam, with several bushels of loose corn in
the ear.  One was driving, listlessly bent forward, his elbows
on his knees,--a happy-go-lucky, careless picture of irrespon-
sibility.  The other was fast asleep in the bottom of the wagon.
As we passed we noticed an ear of corn fall from the wagon.
They never saw it,--not they.  A rod farther on we noted
another ear on the ground; and between that creeping mule
and town we counted twenty-six ears of corn.  Shiftless?  Yes,
the personification of shiftlessness.  And yet follow those
boys: they are not lazy; to-morrow morning they'll be up with
the sun; they work hard when they do work, and they work
willingly.  They have no sordid, selfish, money-getting ways,
but rather a fine disdain for mere cash.  They'll loaf before
your face and work behind your back with good-natured
honesty.  They'll steal a watermelon, and hand you back your
lost purse intact.  Their great defect as laborers lies in their
lack of incentive beyond the mere pleasure of physical exer-
tion.  They are careless because they have not found that it
pays to be careful; they are improvident because the im-
provident ones of their acquaintance get on about as well as
the provident.  Above all, they cannot see why they should
take unusual pains to make the white man's land better, or to
fatten his mule, or save his corn.  On the other hand, the
white land-owner argues that any attempt to improve these
laborers by increased responsibility, or higher wages, or
better homes, or land of their own, would be sure to result in
failure.  He shows his Northern visitor the scarred and wretched
land; the ruined mansions, the worn-out soil and mortgaged
acres, and says, This is Negro freedom!

Now it happens that both master and man have just enough
argument on their respective sides to make it difficult for
them to understand each other.  The Negro dimly personifies
in the white man all his ills and misfortunes; if he is poor, it
is because the white man seizes the fruit of his toil; if he is
ignorant, it is because the white man gives him neither time
nor facilities to learn; and, indeed, if any misfortune happens
to him, it is because of some hidden machinations of "white
folks."  On the other hand, the masters and the masters' sons
have never been able to see why the Negro, instead of settling
down to he day-laborers for bread and clothes, are infected
with a silly desire to rise in the world, and why they are
sulky, dissatisfied, and careless, where their fathers were
happy and dumb and faithful.  "Why, you niggers have an
easier time than I do," said a puzzled Albany merchant to his
black customer.  "Yes," he replied, "and so does yo' hogs."

Taking, then, the dissatisfied and shiftless field-hand as a
starting-point, let us inquire how the black thousands of
Dougherty have struggled from him up toward their ideal,
and what that ideal is.  All social struggle is evidenced by the
rise, first of economic, then of social classes, among a homo-
geneous population.  To-day the following economic classes
are plainly differentiated among these Negroes.

A "submerged tenth" of croppers, with a few paupers;
forty per cent who are metayers and thirty-nine per cent of
semi-metayers and wage-laborers.  There are left five per cent
of money-renters and six per cent of freeholders,--the "Up-
per Ten" of the land.  The croppers are entirely without
capital, even in the limited sense of food or money to keep
them from seed-time to harvest.  All they furnish is their
labor; the land-owner furnishes land, stock, tools, seed, and
house; and at the end of the year the laborer gets from a third
to a half of the crop.  Out of his share, however, comes pay
and interest for food and clothing advanced him during the
year.  Thus we have a laborer without capital and without
wages, and an employer whose capital is largely his employ-
ees' wages.  It is an unsatisfactory arrangement, both for hirer
and hired, and is usually in vogue on poor land with hard-
pressed owners.

Above the croppers come the great mass of the black
population who work the land on their own responsibility,
paying rent in cotton and supported by the crop-mortgage
system.  After the war this system was attractive to the freedmen
on account of its larger freedom and its possibility for making
a surplus.  But with the carrying out of the crop-lien system,
the deterioration of the land, and the slavery of debt, the
position of the metayers has sunk to a dead level of practi-
cally unrewarded toil.  Formerly all tenants had some capital,
and often considerable; but absentee landlordism, rising rack-
rent, and failing cotton have stripped them well-nigh of all,
and probably not over half of them to-day own their mules.
The change from cropper to tenant was accomplished by
fixing the rent.  If, now, the rent fixed was reasonable, this
was an incentive to the tenant to strive.  On the other hand, if
the rent was too high, or if the land deteriorated, the result
was to discourage and check the efforts of the black peas-
antry.  There is no doubt that the latter case is true; that in
Dougherty County every economic advantage of the price of
cotton in market and of the strivings of the tenant has been
taken advantage of by the landlords and merchants, and
swallowed up in rent and interest.  If cotton rose in price, the
rent rose even higher; if cotton fell, the rent remained or
followed reluctantly.  If the tenant worked hard and raised a
large crop, his rent was raised the next year; if that year the
crop failed, his corn was confiscated and his mule sold for
debt.  There were, of course, exceptions to this,--cases of
personal kindness and forbearance; but in the vast majority of
cases the rule was to extract the uttermost farthing from the
mass of the black farm laborers.

The average metayer pays from twenty to thirty per cent of
his crop in rent.  The result of such rack-rent can only be
evil,--abuse and neglect of the soil, deterioration in the
character of the laborers, and a widespread sense of injustice.
"Wherever the country is poor," cried Arthur Young, "it is
in the hands of metayers," and "their condition is more
wretched than that of day-laborers."  He was talking of Italy a
century ago; but he might have been talking of Dougherty
County to-day.  And especially is that true to-day which he
declares was true in France before the Revolution: "The
metayers are considered as little better than menial servants,
removable at pleasure, and obliged to conform in all things to
the will of the landlords."  On this low plane half the black
population of Dougherty County--perhaps more than half the
black millions of this land--are to-day struggling.

A degree above these we may place those laborers who
receive money wages for their work.  Some receive a house
with perhaps a garden-spot; then supplies of food and cloth-
ing are advanced, and certain fixed wages are given at the
end of the year, varying from thirty to sixty dollars, out of
which the supplies must be paid for, with interest.  About
eighteen per cent of the population belong to this class of
semi-metayers, while twenty-two per cent are laborers paid
by the month or year, and are either "furnished" by their
own savings or perhaps more usually by some merchant who
takes his chances of payment.  Such laborers receive from
thirty-five to fifty cents a day during the working season.
They are usually young unmarried persons, some being women;
and when they marry they sink to the class of metayers, or,
more seldom, become renters.

The renters for fixed money rentals are the first of the
emerging classes, and form five per cent of the families.  The
sole advantage of this small class is their freedom to choose
their crops, and the increased responsibility which comes
through having money transactions.  While some of the rent-
ers differ little in condition from the metayers, yet on the
whole they are more intelligent and responsible persons, and
are the ones who eventually become land-owners.  Their bet-
ter character and greater shrewdness enable them to gain,
perhaps to demand, better terms in rents; rented farms, vary-
ing from forty to a hundred acres, bear an average rental of
about fifty-four dollars a year.  The men who conduct such
farms do not long remain renters; either they sink to meta-
yers, or with a successful series of harvests rise to be
land-owners.

In 1870 the tax-books of Dougherty report no Negroes as
landholders.  If there were any such at that time,--and there
may have been a few,--their land was probably held in the
name of some white patron,--a method not uncommon
during slavery.  In 1875 ownership of land had begun with
seven hundred and fifty acres; ten years later this had in-
creased to over sixty-five hundred acres, to nine thousand
acres in 1890 and ten thousand in 1900.  The total assessed
property has in this same period risen from eighty thousand
dollars in 1875 to two hundred and forty thousand dollars in
1900.

Two circumstances complicate this development and make
it in some respects difficult to be sure of the real tendencies;
they are the panic of 1893, and the low price of cotton in
1898.  Besides this, the system of assessing property in the
country districts of Georgia is somewhat antiquated and of
uncertain statistical value; there are no assessors, and each
man makes a sworn return to a tax-receiver.  Thus public
opinion plays a large part, and the returns vary strangely from
year to year.  Certainly these figures show the small amount
of accumulated capital among the Negroes, and the conse-
quent large dependence of their property on temporary pros-
perity.  They have little to tide over a few years of economic
depression, and are at the mercy of the cotton-market far
more than the whites.  And thus the land-owners, despite their
marvellous efforts, are really a transient class, continually
being depleted by those who fall back into the class of renters
or metayers, and augmented by newcomers from the masses.
Of one hundred land-owners in 1898, half had bought their
land since 1893, a fourth between 1890 and 1893, a fifth
between 1884 and 1890, and the rest between 1870 and 1884.
In all, one hundred and eighty-five Negroes have owned land
in this county since 1875.

If all the black land-owners who had ever held land here
had kept it or left it in the hands of black men, the Negroes
would have owned nearer thirty thousand acres than the
fifteen thousand they now hold.  And yet these fifteen thou-
sand acres are a creditable showing,--a proof of no little
weight of the worth and ability of the Negro people.  If they
had been given an economic start at Emancipation, if they
had been in an enlightened and rich community which really
desired their best good, then we might perhaps call such a
result small or even insignificant.  But for a few thousand
poor ignorant field-hands, in the face of poverty, a falling
market, and social stress, to save and capitalize two hundred
thousand dollars in a generation has meant a tremendous
effort.  The rise of a nation, the pressing forward of a social
class, means a bitter struggle, a hard and soul-sickening battle
with the world such as few of the more favored classes know
or appreciate.

Out of the hard economic conditions of this portion of the
Black Belt, only six per cent of the population have suc-
ceeded in emerging into peasant proprietorship; and these are
not all firmly fixed, but grow and shrink in number with the
wavering of the cotton-market.  Fully ninety-four per cent have
struggled for land and failed, and half of them sit in hopeless
serfdom.  For these there is one other avenue of escape toward
which they have turned in increasing numbers, namely, mi-
gration to town.  A glance at the distribution of land among
the black owners curiously reveals this fact.  In 1898 the
holdings were as follows: Under forty acres, forty-nine fami-
lies; forty to two hundred and fifty acres, seventeen families;
two hundred and fifty to one thousand acres, thirteen fami-
lies; one thousand or more acres, two families.  Now in 1890
there were forty-four holdings, but only nine of these were
under forty acres.  The great increase of holdings, then, has
come in the buying of small homesteads near town, where
their owners really share in the town life; this is a part of the
rush to town.  And for every land-owner who has thus hurried
away from the narrow and hard conditions of country life,
how many field-hands, how many tenants, how many ruined
renters, have joined that long procession?  Is it not strange
compensation?  The sin of the country districts is visited on
the town, and the social sores of city life to-day may, here in
Dougherty County, and perhaps in many places near and far,
look for their final healing without the city walls.






IX

Of the Sons of Master and Man

Life treads on life, and heart on heart;
We press too close in church and mart
To keep a dream or grave apart.

MRS. BROWNING.


The world-old phenomenon of the contact of diverse races of
men is to have new exemplification during the new century.
Indeed, the characteristic of our age is the contact of European
civilization with the world's undeveloped peoples.  Whatever
we may say of the results of such contact in the past, it
certainly forms a chapter in human action not pleasant to
look back upon.  War, murder, slavery, extermination, and
debauchery,--this has again and again been the result of
carrying civilization and the blessed gospel to the isles of the
sea and the heathen without the law.  Nor does it altogether
satisfy the conscience of the modern world to be told compla-
cently that all this has been right and proper, the fated
triumph of strength over weakness, of righteousness over
evil, of superiors over inferiors.  It would certainly be sooth-
ing if one could readily believe all this; and yet there are too
many ugly facts for everything to be thus easily explained
away.  We feel and know that there are many delicate differ-
ences in race psychology, numberless changes that our crude
social measurements are not yet able to follow minutely,
which explain much of history and social development.  At
the same time, too, we know that these considerations have
never adequately explained or excused the triumph of brute
force and cunning over weakness and innocence.

It is, then, the strife of all honorable men of the twentieth
century to see that in the future competition of races the
survival of the fittest shall mean the triumph of the good, the
beautiful, and the true; that we may be able to preserve for
future civilization all that is really fine and noble and strong,
and not continue to put a premium on greed and impudence
and cruelty.  To bring this hope to fruition, we are compelled
daily to turn more and more to a conscientious study of the
phenomena of race-contact,--to a study frank and fair, and
not falsified and colored by our wishes or our fears.  And we
have in the South as fine a field for such a study as the world
affords,--a field, to be sure, which the average American
scientist deems somewhat beneath his dignity, and which the
average man who is not a scientist knows all about, but
nevertheless a line of study which by reason of the enormous
race complications with which God seems about to punish
this nation must increasingly claim our sober attention, study,
and thought, we must ask, what are the actual relations of
whites and blacks in the South? and we must be answered,
not by apology or fault-finding, but by a plain, unvarnished
tale.

In the civilized life of to-day the contact of men and their
relations to each other fall in a few main lines of action and
communication: there is, first, the physical proximity of home
and dwelling-places, the way in which neighborhoods group
themselves, and the contiguity of neighborhoods.  Secondly,
and in our age chiefest, there are the economic relations,
--the methods by which individuals cooperate for earning a
living, for the mutual satisfaction of wants, for the production
of wealth.  Next, there are the political relations, the cooperation
in social control, in group government, in laying and paying
the burden of taxation.  In the fourth place there are the less
tangible but highly important forms of intellectual contact and
commerce, the interchange of ideas through conversation and
conference, through periodicals and libraries; and, above all,
the gradual formation for each community of that curious
tertium quid which we call public opinion.  Closely allied with
this come the various forms of social contact in everyday life,
in travel, in theatres, in house gatherings, in marrying and
giving in marriage.  Finally, there are the varying forms of
religious enterprise, of moral teaching and benevolent en-
deavor.  These are the principal ways in which men living in
the same communities are brought into contact with each
other.  It is my present task, therefore, to indicate, from my
point of view, how the black race in the South meet and
mingle with the whites in these matters of everyday life.

First, as to physical dwelling.  It is usually possible to draw
in nearly every Southern community a physical color-line on
the map, on the one side of which whites dwell and on the
other Negroes.  The winding and intricacy of the geographical
color-line varies, of course, in different communities.  I know
some towns where a straight line drawn through the middle of
the main street separates nine-tenths of the whites from nine-
tenths of the blacks.  In other towns the older settlement of
whites has been encircled by a broad band of blacks; in still
other cases little settlements or nuclei of blacks have sprung
up amid surrounding whites.  Usually in cities each street has
its distinctive color, and only now and then do the colors
meet in close proximity.  Even in the country something of
this segregation is manifest in the smaller areas, and of course
in the larger phenomena of the Black Belt.

All this segregation by color is largely independent of that
natural clustering by social grades common to all communi-
ties.  A Negro slum may be in dangerous proximity to a white
residence quarter, while it is quite common to find a white
slum planted in the heart of a respectable Negro district.  One
thing, however, seldom occurs: the best of the whites and the
best of the Negroes almost never live in anything like close
proximity.  It thus happens that in nearly every Southern town
and city, both whites and blacks see commonly the worst of
each other.  This is a vast change from the situation in the
past, when, through the close contact of master and house-
servant in the patriarchal big house, one found the best of both
races in close contact and sympathy, while at the same time
the squalor and dull round of toil among the field-hands was
removed from the sight and hearing of the family.  One can
easily see how a person who saw slavery thus from his
father's parlors, and sees freedom on the streets of a great
city, fails to grasp or comprehend the whole of the new
picture.  On the other hand, the settled belief of the mass of
the Negroes that the Southern white people do not have the
black man's best interests at heart has been intensified in later
years by this continual daily contact of the better class of
blacks with the worst representatives of the white race.

Coming now to the economic relations of the races, we are
on ground made familiar by study, much discussion, and no
little philanthropic effort.  And yet with all this there are many
essential elements in the cooperation of Negroes and whites
for work and wealth that are too readily overlooked or not
thoroughly understood.  The average American can easily con-
ceive of a rich land awaiting development and filled with
black laborers.  To him the Southern problem is simply that of
making efficient workingmen out of this material, by giving
them the requisite technical skill and the help of invested
capital.  The problem, however, is by no means as simple as
this, from the obvious fact that these workingmen have been
trained for centuries as slaves.  They exhibit, therefore, all the
advantages and defects of such training; they are willing and
good-natured, but not self-reliant, provident, or careful.  If
now the economic development of the South is to be pushed
to the verge of exploitation, as seems probable, then we have
a mass of workingmen thrown into relentless competition
with the workingmen of the world, but handicapped by a
training the very opposite to that of the modern self-reliant
democratic laborer.  What the black laborer needs is careful
personal guidance, group leadership of men with hearts in
their bosoms, to train them to foresight, carefulness, and
honesty.  Nor does it require any fine-spun theories of racial
differences to prove the necessity of such group training after
the brains of the race have been knocked out by two hundred
and fifty years of assiduous education in submission, care-
lessness, and stealing.  After Emancipation, it was the plain
duty of some one to assume this group leadership and training
of the Negro laborer.  I will not stop here to inquire whose
duty it was--whether that of the white ex-master who had
profited by unpaid toil, or the Northern philanthropist whose
persistence brought on the crisis, or the National Government
whose edict freed the bondmen; I will not stop to ask whose
duty it was, but I insist it was the duty of some one to see that
these workingmen were not left alone and unguided, without
capital, without land, without skill, without economic organi-
zation, without even the bald protection of law, order, and
decency,--left in a great land, not to settle down to slow and
careful internal development, but destined to be thrown al-
most immediately into relentless and sharp competition with
the best of modern workingmen under an economic system
where every participant is fighting for himself, and too often
utterly regardless of the rights or welfare of his neighbor.

For we must never forget that the economic system of the
South to-day which has succeeded the old regime is not the
same system as that of the old industrial North, of England,
or of France, with their trade-unions, their restrictive laws,
their written and unwritten commercial customs, and their
long experience.  It is, rather, a copy of that England of the
early nineteenth century, before the factory acts,--the En-
gland that wrung pity from thinkers and fired the wrath of
Carlyle.  The rod of empire that passed from the hands of
Southern gentlemen in 1865, partly by force, partly by their
own petulance, has never returned to them.  Rather it has
passed to those men who have come to take charge of the
industrial exploitation of the New South,--the sons of poor
whites fired with a new thirst for wealth and power, thrifty
and avaricious Yankees, and unscrupulous immigrants.  Into
the hands of these men the Southern laborers, white and
black, have fallen; and this to their sorrow.  For the laborers
as such, there is in these new captains of industry neither love
nor hate, neither sympathy nor romance; it is a cold question
of dollars and dividends.  Under such a system all labor is
bound to suffer.  Even the white laborers are not yet intelli-
gent, thrifty, and well trained enough to maintain themselves
against the powerful inroads of organized capital.  The results
among them, even, are long hours of toil, low wages, child
labor, and lack of protection against usury and cheating.  But
among the black laborers all this is aggravated, first, by a
race prejudice which varies from a doubt and distrust among
the best element of whites to a frenzied hatred among the
worst; and, secondly, it is aggravated, as I have said before,
by the wretched economic heritage of the freedmen from
slavery.  With this training it is difficult for the freedman to
learn to grasp the opportunities already opened to him, and the
new opportunities are seldom given him, but go by favor to
the whites.

Left by the best elements of the South with little protection
or oversight, he has been made in law and custom the victim
of the worst and most unscrupulous men in each community.
The crop-lien system which is depopulating the fields of the
South is not simply the result of shiftlessness on the part of
Negroes, but is also the result of cunningly devised laws as to
mortgages, liens, and misdemeanors, which can be made by
conscienceless men to entrap and snare the unwary until
escape is impossible, further toil a farce, and protest a crime.
I have seen, in the Black Belt of Georgia, an ignorant, honest
Negro buy and pay for a farm in installments three separate
times, and then in the face of law and decency the enterpris-
ing American who sold it to him pocketed the money and
deed and left the black man landless, to labor on his own land
at thirty cents a day.  I have seen a black farmer fall in debt to
a white storekeeper, and that storekeeper go to his farm and
strip it of every single marketable article,--mules, ploughs,
stored crops, tools, furniture, bedding, clocks, looking-glass,
--and all this without a sheriff or officer, in the face of the
law for homestead exemptions, and without rendering to a
single responsible person any account or reckoning.  And such
proceedings can happen, and will happen, in any community
where a class of ignorant toilers are placed by custom and
race-prejudice beyond the pale of sympathy and race-
brotherhood.  So long as the best elements of a community do
not feel in duty bound to protect and train and care for the
weaker members of their group, they leave them to be preyed
upon by these swindlers and rascals.

This unfortunate economic situation does not mean the
hindrance of all advance in the black South, or the absence of
a class of black landlords and mechanics who, in spite of
disadvantages, are accumulating property and making good
citizens.  But it does mean that this class is not nearly so large
as a fairer economic system might easily make it, that those
who survive in the competition are handicapped so as to
accomplish much less than they deserve to, and that, above
all, the personnel of the successful class is left to chance and
accident, and not to any intelligent culling or reasonable
methods of selection.  As a remedy for this, there is but one
possible procedure.  We must accept some of the race preju-
dice in the South as a fact,--deplorable in its intensity,
unfortunate in results, and dangerous for the future, but nev-
ertheless a hard fact which only time can efface.  We cannot
hope, then, in this generation, or for several generations, that
the mass of the whites can be brought to assume that close
sympathetic and self-sacrificing leadership of the blacks which
their present situation so eloquently demands.  Such leader-
ship, such social teaching and example, must come from the
blacks themselves.  For some time men doubted as to whether
the Negro could develop such leaders; but to-day no one
seriously disputes the capability of individual Negroes to
assimilate the culture and common sense of modern civiliza-
tion, and to pass it on, to some extent at least, to their
fellows.  If this is true, then here is the path out of the
economic situation, and here is the imperative demand for
trained Negro leaders of character and intelligence,--men of
skill, men of light and leading, college-bred men, black
captains of industry, and missionaries of culture; men who
thoroughly comprehend and know modern civilization, and
can take hold of Negro communities and raise and train them
by force of precept and example, deep sympathy, and the
inspiration of common blood and ideals.  But if such men are
to be effective they must have some power,--they must be
backed by the best public opinion of these communities, and
able to wield for their objects and aims such weapons as the
experience of the world has taught are indispensable to hu-
man progress.

Of such weapons the greatest, perhaps, in the modern
world is the power of the ballot; and this brings me to a
consideration of the third form of contact between whites and
blacks in the South,--political activity.

In the attitude of the American mind toward Negro suffrage
can be traced with unusual accuracy the prevalent conceptions
of government.  In the fifties we were near enough the echoes
of the French Revolution to believe pretty thoroughly in
universal suffrage.  We argued, as we thought then rather
logically, that no social class was so good, so true, and so
disinterested as to be trusted wholly with the political destiny
of its neighbors; that in every state the best arbiters of their
own welfare are the persons directly affected; consequently
that it is only by arming every hand with a ballot,--with the
right to have a voice in the policy of the state,--that the
greatest good to the greatest number could be attained.  To be
sure, there were objections to these arguments, but we thought
we had answered them tersely and convincingly; if some one
complained of the ignorance of voters, we answered, "Edu-
cate them."  If another complained of their venality, we
replied, "Disfranchise them or put them in jail."  And, fi-
nally, to the men who feared demagogues and the natural
perversity of some human beings we insisted that time and
bitter experience would teach the most hardheaded.  It was at
this time that the question of Negro suffrage in the South was
raised.  Here was a defenceless people suddenly made free.
How were they to be protected from those who did not
believe in their freedom and were determined to thwart it?
Not by force, said the North; not by government guardian-
ship, said the South; then by the ballot, the sole and legiti-
mate defence of a free people, said the Common Sense of the
Nation.  No one thought, at the time, that the ex-slaves could
use the ballot intelligently or very effectively; but they did
think that the possession of so great power by a great class in
the nation would compel their fellows to educate this class to
its intelligent use.

Meantime, new thoughts came to the nation: the inevitable
period of moral retrogression and political trickery that ever
follows in the wake of war overtook us.  So flagrant became
the political scandals that reputable men began to leave poli-
tics alone, and politics consequently became disreputable.
Men began to pride themselves on having nothing to do with
their own government, and to agree tacitly with those who
regarded public office as a private perquisite.  In this state of
mind it became easy to wink at the suppression of the Negro
vote in the South, and to advise self-respecting Negroes to
leave politics entirely alone.  The decent and reputable citi-
zens of the North who neglected their own civic duties grew
hilarious over the exaggerated importance with which the
Negro regarded the franchise.  Thus it easily happened that
more and more the better class of Negroes followed the
advice from abroad and the pressure from home, and took no
further interest in politics, leaving to the careless and the
venal of their race the exercise of their rights as voters.  The
black vote that still remained was not trained and educated,
but further debauched by open and unblushing bribery, or
force and fraud; until the Negro voter was thoroughly inocu-
lated with the idea that politics was a method of private gain
by disreputable means.

And finally, now, to-day, when we are awakening to the
fact that the perpetuity of republican institutions on this conti-
nent depends on the purification of the ballot, the civic
training of voters, and the raising of voting to the plane of a
solemn duty which a patriotic citizen neglects to his peril and
to the peril of his children's children,--in this day, when we
are striving for a renaissance of civic virtue, what are we
going to say to the black voter of the South?  Are we going to
tell him still that politics is a disreputable and useless form of
human activity?  Are we going to induce the best class of
Negroes to take less and less interest in government, and to
give up their right to take such an interest, without a protest?
I am not saying a word against all legitimate efforts to purge
the ballot of ignorance, pauperism, and crime.  But few have
pretended that the present movement for disfranchisement in
the South is for such a purpose; it has been plainly and
frankly declared in nearly every case that the object of the
disfranchising laws is the elimination of the black man from
politics.

Now, is this a minor matter which has no influence on the
main question of the industrial and intellectual development
of the Negro?  Can we establish a mass of black laborers and
artisans and landholders in the South who, by law and public
opinion, have absolutely no voice in shaping the laws under
which they live and work?  Can the modern organization of
industry, assuming as it does free democratic government and
the power and ability of the laboring classes to compel re-
spect for their welfare,--can this system be carried out in the
South when half its laboring force is voiceless in the public
councils and powerless in its own defence?  To-day the black
man of the South has almost nothing to say as to how much
he shall be taxed, or how those taxes shall be expended; as to
who shall execute the laws, and how they shall do it; as to
who shall make the laws, and how they shall be made.  It is
pitiable that frantic efforts must be made at critical times to
get law-makers in some States even to listen to the respectful
presentation of the black man's side of a current controversy.
Daily the Negro is coming more and more to look upon law
and justice, not as protecting safeguards, but as sources of
humiliation and oppression.  The laws are made by men who
have little interest in him; they are executed by men who have
absolutely no motive for treating the black people with cour-
tesy or consideration; and, finally, the accused law-breaker is
tried, not by his peers, but too often by men who would
rather punish ten innocent Negroes than let one guilty one
escape.

I should be the last one to deny the patent weaknesses and
shortcomings of the Negro people; I should be the last to
withhold sympathy from the white South in its efforts to solve
its intricate social problems.  I freely acknowledged that it is
possible, and sometimes best, that a partially undeveloped
people should be ruled by the best of their stronger and better
neighbors for their own good, until such time as they can start
and fight the world's battles alone.  I have already pointed out
how sorely in need of such economic and spiritual guidance
the emancipated Negro was, and I am quite willing to admit
that if the representatives of the best white Southern public
opinion were the ruling and guiding powers in the South
to-day the conditions indicated would be fairly well fulfilled.
But the point I have insisted upon and now emphasize again,
is that the best opinion of the South to-day is not the ruling
opinion.  That to leave the Negro helpless and without a ballot
to-day is to leave him not to the guidance of the best, but
rather to the exploitation and debauchment of the worst; that
this is no truer of the South than of the North,--of the North
than of Europe: in any land, in any country under modern
free competition, to lay any class of weak and despised
people, be they white, black, or blue, at the political mercy
of their stronger, richer, and more resourceful fellows, is a
temptation which human nature seldom has withstood and
seldom will withstand.

Moreover, the political status of the Negro in the South is
closely connected with the question of Negro crime.  There
can be no doubt that crime among Negroes has sensibly
increased in the last thirty years, and that there has appeared
in the slums of great cities a distinct criminal class among the
blacks.  In explaining this unfortunate development, we must
note two things: (1) that the inevitable result of Emancipation
was to increase crime and criminals, and (2) that the police
system of the South was primarily designed to control slaves.
As to the first point, we must not forget that under a strict
slave system there can scarcely be such a thing as crime.  But
when these variously constituted human particles are sud-
denly thrown broadcast on the sea of life, some swim, some
sink, and some hang suspended, to be forced up or down by
the chance currents of a busy hurrying world.  So great an
economic and social revolution as swept the South in '63
meant a weeding out among the Negroes of the incompetents
and vicious, the beginning of a differentiation of social grades.
Now a rising group of people are not lifted bodily from the
ground like an inert solid mass, but rather stretch upward like
a living plant with its roots still clinging in the mould.  The
appearance, therefore, of the Negro criminal was a phenome-
non to be awaited; and while it causes anxiety, it should not
occasion surprise.

Here again the hope for the future depended peculiarly on
careful and delicate dealing with these criminals.  Their of-
fences at first were those of laziness, carelessness, and im-
pulse, rather than of malignity or ungoverned viciousness.
Such misdemeanors needed discriminating treatment, firm but
reformatory, with no hint of injustice, and full proof of guilt.
For such dealing with criminals, white or black, the South
had no machinery, no adequate jails or reformatories; its
police system was arranged to deal with blacks alone, and
tacitly assumed that every white man was ipso facto a mem-
ber of that police.  Thus grew up a double system of justice,
which erred on the white side by undue leniency and the
practical immunity of red-handed criminals, and erred on the
black side by undue severity, injustice, and lack of discrimi-
nation.  For, as I have said, the police system of the South
was originally designed to keep track of all Negroes, not
simply of criminals; and when the Negroes were freed and
the whole South was convinced of the impossibility of free
Negro labor, the first and almost universal device was to
use the courts as a means of reenslaving the blacks.  It
was not then a question of crime, but rather one of color,
that settled a man's conviction on almost any charge.  Thus
Negroes came to look upon courts as instruments of in-
justice and oppression, and upon those convicted in them
as martyrs and victims.

When, now, the real Negro criminal appeared, and instead of
petty stealing and vagrancy we began to have highway rob-
bery, burglary, murder, and rape, there was a curious effect
on both sides the color-line: the Negroes refused to believe
the evidence of white witnesses or the fairness of white
juries, so that the greatest deterrent to crime, the public
opinion of one's own social caste, was lost, and the criminal
was looked upon as crucified rather than hanged.  On the
other hand, the whites, used to being careless as to the guilt
or innocence of accused Negroes, were swept in moments of
passion beyond law, reason, and decency.  Such a situation is
bound to increase crime, and has increased it.  To natural
viciousness and vagrancy are being daily added motives of
revolt and revenge which stir up all the latent savagery of
both races and make peaceful attention to economic de-
velopment often impossible.

But the chief problem in any community cursed with crime
is not the punishment of the criminals, but the preventing of
the young from being trained to crime.  And here again the
peculiar conditions of the South have prevented proper pre-
cautions.  I have seen twelve-year-old boys working in chains
on the public streets of Atlanta, directly in front of the
schools, in company with old and hardened criminals; and
this indiscriminate mingling of men and women and children
makes the chain-gangs perfect schools of crime and debauch-
ery.  The struggle for reformatories, which has gone on in
Virginia, Georgia, and other States, is the one encouraging
sign of the awakening of some communities to the suicidal
results of this policy.

It is the public schools, however, which can be made,
outside the homes, the greatest means of training decent
self-respecting citizens.  We have been so hotly engaged re-
cently in discussing trade-schools and the higher education
that the pitiable plight of the public-school system in the
South has almost dropped from view.  Of every five dollars
spent for public education in the State of Georgia, the white
schools get four dollars and the Negro one dollar; and even
then the white public-school system, save in the cities, is bad
and cries for reform.  If this is true of the whites, what of the
blacks?  I am becoming more and more convinced, as I look
upon the system of common-school training in the South, that
the national government must soon step in and aid popular
education in some way.  To-day it has been only by the most
strenuous efforts on the part of the thinking men of the South
that the Negro's share of the school fund has not been cut
down to a pittance in some half-dozen States; and that move-
ment not only is not dead, but in many communities is
gaining strength.  What in the name of reason does this nation
expect of a people, poorly trained and hard pressed in severe
economic competition, without political rights, and with ludi-
crously inadequate common-school facilities?  What can it
expect but crime and listlessness, offset here and there by the
dogged struggles of the fortunate and more determined who
are themselves buoyed by the hope that in due time the country
will come to its senses?

I have thus far sought to make clear the physical, eco-
nomic, and political relations of the Negroes and whites in
the South, as I have conceived them, including, for the
reasons set forth, crime and education.  But after all that has
been said on these more tangible matters of human contact,
there still remains a part essential to a proper description of
the South which it is difficult to describe or fix in terms easily
understood by strangers.  It is, in fine, the atmosphere of the
land, the thought and feeling, the thousand and one little
actions which go to make up life.  In any community or nation
it is these little things which are most elusive to the grasp and
yet most essential to any clear conception of the group life
taken as a whole.  What is thus true of all communities is
peculiarly true of the South, where, outside of written history
and outside of printed law, there has been going on for a
generation as deep a storm and stress of human souls, as
intense a ferment of feeling, as intricate a writhing of spirit,
as ever a people experienced.  Within and without the sombre
veil of color vast social forces have been at work,--efforts
for human betterment, movements toward disintegration and
despair, tragedies and comedies in social and economic life,
and a swaying and lifting and sinking of human hearts which
have made this land a land of mingled sorrow and joy, of
change and excitement and unrest.

The centre of this spiritual turmoil has ever been the mil-
lions of black freedmen and their sons, whose destiny is so
fatefully bound up with that of the nation.  And yet the casual
observer visiting the South sees at first little of this.  He notes
the growing frequency of dark faces as he rides along,--but
otherwise the days slip lazily on, the sun shines, and this little
world seems as happy and contented as other worlds he has
visited.  Indeed, on the question of questions--the Negro
problem--he hears so little that there almost seems to be a
conspiracy of silence; the morning papers seldom mention it,
and then usually in a far-fetched academic way, and indeed
almost every one seems to forget and ignore the darker half of
the land, until the astonished visitor is inclined to ask if after
all there IS any problem here.  But if he lingers long enough
there comes the awakening: perhaps in a sudden whirl of
passion which leaves him gasping at its bitter intensity; more
likely in a gradually dawning sense of things he had not at
first noticed.  Slowly but surely his eyes begin to catch the
shadows of the color-line: here he meets crowds of Negroes
and whites; then he is suddenly aware that he cannot discover
a single dark face; or again at the close of a day's wandering
he may find himself in some strange assembly, where all
faces are tinged brown or black, and where he has the vague,
uncomfortable feeling of the stranger.  He realizes at last that
silently, resistlessly, the world about flows by him in two
great streams: they ripple on in the same sunshine, they
approach and mingle their waters in seeming carelessness,
--then they divide and flow wide apart.  It is done quietly; no
mistakes are made, or if one occurs, the swift arm of the law
and of public opinion swings down for a moment, as when
the other day a black man and a white woman were arrested
for talking together on Whitehall Street in Atlanta.

Now if one notices carefully one will see that between
these two worlds, despite much physical contact and daily
intermingling, there is almost no community of intellectual
life or point of transference where the thoughts and feelings
of one race can come into direct contact and sympathy with
the thoughts and feelings of the other.  Before and directly
after the war, when all the best of the Negroes were domestic
servants in the best of the white families, there were bonds of
intimacy, affection, and sometimes blood relationship, be-
tween the races.  They lived in the same home, shared in the
family life, often attended the same church, and talked and
conversed with each other.  But the increasing civilization of
the Negro since then has naturally meant the development of
higher classes: there are increasing numbers of ministers,
teachers, physicians, merchants, mechanics, and independent
farmers, who by nature and training are the aristocracy and
leaders of the blacks.  Between them, however, and the best
element of the whites, there is little or no intellectual com-
merce.  They go to separate churches, they live in separate
sections, they are strictly separated in all public gatherings,
they travel separately, and they are beginning to read dif-
ferent papers and books.  To most libraries, lectures, concerts,
and museums, Negroes are either not admitted at all, or on
terms peculiarly galling to the pride of the very classes who
might otherwise be attracted.  The daily paper chronicles the
doings of the black world from afar with no great regard
for accuracy; and so on, throughout the category of means for
intellectual communication,--schools, conferences, efforts for
social betterment, and the like,--it is usually true that the
very representatives of the two races, who for mutual benefit
and the welfare of the land ought to be in complete under-
standing and sympathy, are so far strangers that one side
thinks all whites are narrow and prejudiced, and the other
thinks educated Negroes dangerous and insolent.  Moreover,
in a land where the tyranny of public opinion and the intoler-
ance of criticism is for obvious historical reasons so strong as
in the South, such a situation is extremely difficult to correct.
The white man, as well as the Negro, is bound and barred by
the color-line, and many a scheme of friendliness and philan-
thropy, of broad-minded sympathy and generous fellowship
between the two has dropped still-born because some busy-
body has forced the color-question to the front and brought
the tremendous force of unwritten law against the innovators.

It is hardly necessary for me to add very much in regard to
the social contact between the races.  Nothing has come to
replace that finer sympathy and love between some masters
and house servants which the radical and more uncompromis-
ing drawing of the color-line in recent years has caused
almost completely to disappear.  In a world where it means so
much to take a man by the hand and sit beside him, to look
frankly into his eyes and feel his heart beating with red blood;
in a world where a social cigar or a cup of tea together means
more than legislative halls and magazine articles and speeches,
--one can imagine the consequences of the almost utter
absence of such social amenities between estranged races,
whose separation extends even to parks and streetcars.

Here there can be none of that social going down to the
people,--the opening of heart and hand of the best to the
worst, in generous acknowledgment of a common humanity
and a common destiny.  On the other hand, in matters of
simple almsgiving, where there can be no question of social
contact, and in the succor of the aged and sick, the South, as
if stirred by a feeling of its unfortunate limitations, is gener-
ous to a fault.  The black beggar is never turned away without
a good deal more than a crust, and a call for help for the
unfortunate meets quick response.  I remember, one cold win-
ter, in Atlanta, when I refrained from contributing to a public
relief fund lest Negroes should be discriminated against, I
afterward inquired of a friend: "Were any black people re-
ceiving aid?"  "Why," said he, "they were all black."

And yet this does not touch the kernel of the problem.
Human advancement is not a mere question of almsgiving,
but rather of sympathy and cooperation among classes who
would scorn charity.  And here is a land where, in the higher
walks of life, in all the higher striving for the good and noble
and true, the color-line comes to separate natural friends and
coworkers; while at the bottom of the social group, in the
saloon, the gambling-hell, and the brothel, that same line
wavers and disappears.

I have sought to paint an average picture of real relations
between the sons of master and man in the South.  I have not
glossed over matters for policy's sake, for I fear we have
already gone too far in that sort of thing.  On the other hand, I
have sincerely sought to let no unfair exaggerations creep in.
I do not doubt that in some Southern communities conditions
are better than those I have indicated; while I am no less
certain that in other communities they are far worse.

Nor does the paradox and danger of this situation fail to
interest and perplex the best conscience of the South.  Deeply
religious and intensely democratic as are the mass of the
whites, they feel acutely the false position in which the Negro
problems place them.  Such an essentially honest-hearted and
generous people cannot cite the caste-levelling precepts of
Christianity, or believe in equality of opportunity for all men,
without coming to feel more and more with each generation
that the present drawing of the color-line is a flat contradic-
tion to their beliefs and professions.  But just as often as they
come to this point, the present social condition of the Negro
stands as a menace and a portent before even the most
open-minded: if there were nothing to charge against the
Negro but his blackness or other physical peculiarities, they
argue, the problem would be comparatively simple; but what
can we say to his ignorance, shiftlessness, poverty, and crime?
can a self-respecting group hold anything but the least possi-
ble fellowship with such persons and survive? and shall we let
a mawkish sentiment sweep away the culture of our fathers or
the hope of our children?  The argument so put is of great
strength, but it is not a whit stronger than the argument of
thinking Negroes: granted, they reply, that the condition of
our masses is bad; there is certainly on the one hand adequate
historical cause for this, and unmistakable evidence that no
small number have, in spite of tremendous disadvantages,
risen to the level of American civilization.  And when, by
proscription and prejudice, these same Negroes are classed
with and treated like the lowest of their people, simply because
they are Negroes, such a policy not only discourages thrift
and intelligence among black men, but puts a direct premium
on the very things you complain of,--inefficiency and crime.
Draw lines of crime, of incompetency, of vice, as tightly and
uncompromisingly as you will, for these things must be
proscribed; but a color-line not only does not accomplish this
purpose, but thwarts it.

In the face of two such arguments, the future of the South
depends on the ability of the representatives of these opposing
views to see and appreciate and sympathize with each other's
position,--for the Negro to realize more deeply than he does
at present the need of uplifting the masses of his people, for
the white people to realize more vividly than they have yet
done the deadening and disastrous effect of a color-prejudice
that classes Phillis Wheatley and Sam Hose in the same
despised class.

It is not enough for the Negroes to declare that color-
prejudice is the sole cause of their social condition, nor for
the white South to reply that their social condition is the main
cause of prejudice.  They both act as reciprocal cause and
effect, and a change in neither alone will bring the desired
effect.  Both must change, or neither can improve to any great
extent.  The Negro cannot stand the present reactionary ten-
dencies and unreasoning drawing of the color-line indefinitely
without discouragement and retrogression.  And the condition
of the Negro is ever the excuse for further discrimination.
Only by a union of intelligence and sympathy across the
color-line in this critical period of the Republic shall justice
and right triumph,

       "That mind and soul according well,
        May make one music as before,
                  But vaster."






X

Of the Faith of the Fathers

Dim face of Beauty haunting all the world,
  Fair face of Beauty all too fair to see,
Where the lost stars adown the heavens are hurled,--

 There, there alone for thee

 May white peace be.

Beauty, sad face of Beauty, Mystery, Wonder,
  What are these dreams to foolish babbling men
Who cry with little noises 'neath the thunder

 Of Ages ground to sand,

 To a little sand.

FIONA MACLEOD.


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

Those who have not thus witnessed the frenzy of a Negro
revival in the untouched backwoods of the South can but
dimly realize the religious feeling of the slave; as described,
such scenes appear grotesque and funny, but as seen they are
awful.  Three things characterized this religion of the slave,
--the Preacher, the Music, and the Frenzy.  The Preacher is
the most unique personality developed by the Negro on Amer-
ican soil.  A leader, a politician, an orator, a "boss," an
intriguer, an idealist,--all these he is, and ever, too, the
centre of a group of men, now twenty, now a thousand in
number.  The combination of a certain adroitness with deep-
seated earnestness, of tact with consummate ability, gave him
his preeminence, and helps him maintain it.  The type, of
course, varies according to time and place, from the West
Indies in the sixteenth century to New England in the nine-
teenth, and from the Mississippi bottoms to cities like New
Orleans or New York.

The Music of Negro religion is that plaintive rhythmic
melody, with its touching minor cadences, which, despite
caricature and defilement, still remains the most original and
beautiful expression of human life and longing yet born on
American soil.  Sprung from the African forests, where its
counterpart can still be heard, it was adapted, changed, and
intensified by the tragic soul-life of the slave, until, under the
stress of law and whip, it became the one true expression of a
people's sorrow, despair, and hope.

Finally the Frenzy of "Shouting," when the Spirit of the
Lord passed by, and, seizing the devotee, made him mad
with supernatural joy, was the last essential of Negro religion
and the one more devoutly believed in than all the rest.  It
varied in expression from the silent rapt countenance or the
low murmur and moan to the mad abandon of physical fervor,
--the stamping, shrieking, and shouting, the rushing to and
fro and wild waving of arms, the weeping and laughing, the
vision and the trance.  All this is nothing new in the world,
but old as religion, as Delphi and Endor.  And so firm a hold
did it have on the Negro, that many generations firmly be-
lieved that without this visible manifestation of the God there
could be no true communion with the Invisible.

These were the characteristics of Negro religious life as
developed up to the time of Emancipation.  Since under the
peculiar circumstances of the black man's environment they
were the one expression of his higher life, they are of deep
interest to the student of his development, both socially and
psychologically.  Numerous are the attractive lines of inquiry
that here group themselves.  What did slavery mean to the
African savage?  What was his attitude toward the World and
Life?  What seemed to him good and evil,--God and Devil?
Whither went his longings and strivings, and wherefore were
his heart-burnings and disappointments?  Answers to such
questions can come only from a study of Negro religion as a
development, through its gradual changes from the heathen-
ism of the Gold Coast to the institutional Negro church of
Chicago.

Moreover, the religious growth of millions of men, even
though they be slaves, cannot be without potent influence
upon their contemporaries.  The Methodists and Baptists of
America owe much of their condition to the silent but potent
influence of their millions of Negro converts.  Especially is
this noticeable in the South, where theology and religious
philosophy are on this account a long way behind the North,
and where the religion of the poor whites is a plain copy of
Negro thought and methods.  The mass of "gospel" hymns
which has swept through American churches and well-nigh
ruined our sense of song consists largely of debased imita-
tions of Negro melodies made by ears that caught the jingle
but not the music, the body but not the soul, of the Jubilee
songs.  It is thus clear that the study of Negro religion is not
only a vital part of the history of the Negro in America, but
no uninteresting part of American history.

The Negro church of to-day is the social centre of Negro
life in the United States, and the most characteristic expres-
sion of African character.  Take a typical church in a small
Virginia town: it is the "First Baptist"--a roomy brick edi-
fice seating five hundred or more persons, tastefully finished
in Georgia pine, with a carpet, a small organ, and stained-
glass windows.  Underneath is a large assembly room with
benches.  This building is the central club-house of a commu-
nity of a thousand or more Negroes.  Various organizations
meet here,--the church proper, the Sunday-school, two or
three insurance societies, women's societies, secret societies,
and mass meetings of various kinds.  Entertainments, suppers,
and lectures are held beside the five or six regular weekly
religious services.  Considerable sums of money are collected
and expended here, employment is found for the idle, strang-
ers are introduced, news is disseminated and charity distri-
buted.  At the same time this social, intellectual, and economic
centre is a religious centre of great power.  Depravity, Sin,
Redemption, Heaven, Hell, and Damnation are preached twice
a Sunday after the crops are laid by; and few indeed of the
community have the hardihood to withstand conversion.  Back
of this more formal religion, the Church often stands as a real
conserver of morals, a strengthener of family life, and the
final authority on what is Good and Right.

Thus one can see in the Negro church to-day, reproduced
in microcosm, all the great world from which the Negro is cut
off by color-prejudice and social condition.  In the great city
churches the same tendency is noticeable and in many re-
spects emphasized.  A great church like the Bethel of Phila-
delphia has over eleven hundred members, an edifice seating
fifteen hundred persons and valued at one hundred thousand
dollars, an annual budget of five thousand dollars, and a
government consisting of a pastor with several assisting local
preachers, an executive and legislative board, financial boards
and tax collectors; general church meetings for making laws;
sub-divided groups led by class leaders, a company of militia,
and twenty-four auxiliary societies.  The activity of a church
like this is immense and far-reaching, and the bishops who
preside over these organizations throughout the land are among
the most powerful Negro rulers in the world.

Such churches are really governments of men, and conse-
quently a little investigation reveals the curious fact that, in
the South, at least, practically every American Negro is a
church member.  Some, to be sure, are not regularly enrolled,
and a few do not habitually attend services; but, practically, a
proscribed people must have a social centre, and that centre
for this people is the Negro church.  The census of 1890
showed nearly twenty-four thousand Negro churches in the
country, with a total enrolled membership of over two and a
half millions, or ten actual church members to every twenty-
eight persons, and in some Southern States one in every two
persons.  Besides these there is the large number who, while
not enrolled as members, attend and take part in many of the
activities of the church.  There is an organized Negro church
for every sixty black families in the nation, and in some
States for every forty families, owning, on an average, a
thousand dollars' worth of property each, or nearly twenty-six
million dollars in all.

Such, then, is the large development of the Negro church
since Emancipation.  The question now is, What have been
the successive steps of this social history and what are the
present tendencies?  First, we must realize that no such institu-
tion as the Negro church could rear itself without definite
historical foundations.  These foundations we can find if we
remember that the social history of the Negro did not start in
America.  He was brought from a definite social environment,
--the polygamous clan life under the headship of the chief
and the potent influence of the priest.  His religion was nature-
worship, with profound belief in invisible surrounding influ-
ences, good and bad, and his worship was through incantation
and sacrifice.  The first rude change in this life was the slave
ship and the West Indian sugar-fields.  The plantation organi-
zation replaced the clan and tribe, and the white master
replaced the chief with far greater and more despotic powers.
Forced and long-continued toil became the rule of life, the
old ties of blood relationship and kinship disappeared, and
instead of the family appeared a new polygamy and polyan-
dry, which, in some cases, almost reached promiscuity.  It
was a terrific social revolution, and yet some traces were
retained of the former group life, and the chief remaining
institution was the Priest or Medicine-man.  He early appeared
on the plantation and found his function as the healer of the
sick, the interpreter of the Unknown, the comforter of the
sorrowing, the supernatural avenger of wrong, and the one
who rudely but picturesquely expressed the longing, disappoint-
ment, and resentment of a stolen and oppressed people.  Thus,
as bard, physician, judge, and priest, within the narrow limits
allowed by the slave system, rose the Negro preacher, and under
him the first church was not at first by any means Christian
nor definitely organized; rather it was an adaptation and
mingling of heathen rites among the members of each planta-
tion, and roughly designated as Voodooism.  Association with
the masters, missionary effort and motives of expediency
gave these rites an early veneer of Christianity, and after the
lapse of many generations the Negro church became Christian.

Two characteristic things must be noticed in regard to the
church.  First, it became almost entirely Baptist and Methodist
in faith; secondly, as a social institution it antedated by many
decades the monogamic Negro home.  From the very circum-
stances of its beginning, the church was confined to the
plantation, and consisted primarily of a series of disconnected
units; although, later on, some freedom of movement was
allowed, still this geographical limitation was always impor-
tant and was one cause of the spread of the decentralized and
democratic Baptist faith among the slaves.  At the same time,
the visible rite of baptism appealed strongly to their mystic
temperament.  To-day the Baptist Church is still largest in
membership among Negroes, and has a million and a half
communicants.  Next in popularity came the churches organ-
ized in connection with the white neighboring churches, chiefly
Baptist and Methodist, with a few Episcopalian and others.
The Methodists still form the second greatest denomination,
with nearly a million members.  The faith of these two leading
denominations was more suited to the slave church from the
prominence they gave to religious feeling and fervor.  The
Negro membership in other denominations has always been
small and relatively unimportant, although the Episcopalians
and Presbyterians are gaining among the more intelligent
classes to-day, and the Catholic Church is making headway
in certain sections.  After Emancipation, and still earlier in
the North, the Negro churches largely severed such affili-
ations as they had had with the white churches, either by
choice or by compulsion.  The Baptist churches became inde-
pendent, but the Methodists were compelled early to unite for
purposes of episcopal government.  This gave rise to the great
African Methodist Church, the greatest Negro organization in
the world, to the Zion Church and the Colored Methodist,
and to the black conferences and churches in this and other
denominations.

The second fact noted, namely, that the Negro church ante-
dates the Negro home, leads to an explanation of much that is
paradoxical in this communistic institution and in the morals
of its members.  But especially it leads us to regard this
institution as peculiarly the expression of the inner ethical life
of a people in a sense seldom true elsewhere.  Let us turn,
then, from the outer physical development of the church to
the more important inner ethical life of the people who com-
pose it.  The Negro has already been pointed out many times
as a religious animal,--a being of that deep emotional nature
which turns instinctively toward the supernatural.  Endowed
with a rich tropical imagination and a keen, delicate appre-
ciation of Nature, the transplanted African lived in a world
animate with gods and devils, elves and witches; full of
strange influences,--of Good to be implored, of Evil to be
propitiated.  Slavery, then, was to him the dark triumph of
Evil over him.  All the hateful powers of the Under-world
were striving against him, and a spirit of revolt and revenge
filled his heart.  He called up all the resources of heathenism
to aid,--exorcism and witch-craft, the mysterious Obi wor-
ship with its barbarious rites, spells, and blood-sacrifice even,
now and then, of human victims.  Weird midnight orgies and
mystic conjurations were invoked, the witch-woman and the
voodoo-priest became the centre of Negro group life, and that
vein of vague superstition which characterizes the unlettered
Negro even to-day was deepened and strengthened.

In spite, however, of such success as that of the fierce
Maroons, the Danish blacks, and others, the spirit of revolt
gradually died away under the untiring energy and superior
strength of the slave masters.  By the middle of the eighteenth
century the black slave had sunk, with hushed murmurs, to
his place at the bottom of a new economic system, and was
unconsciously ripe for a new philosophy of life.  Nothing
suited his condition then better than the doctrines of passive
submission embodied in the newly learned Christianity.  Slave
masters early realized this, and cheerfully aided religious
propaganda within certain bounds.  The long system of repres-
sion and degradation of the Negro tended to emphasize the
elements of his character which made him a valuable chattel:
courtesy became humility, moral strength degenerated into
submission, and the exquisite native appreciation of the beau-
tiful became an infinite capacity for dumb suffering.  The
Negro, losing the joy of this world, eagerly seized upon the
offered conceptions of the next; the avenging Spirit of the
Lord enjoining patience in this world, under sorrow and
tribulation until the Great Day when He should lead His dark
children home,--this became his comforting dream.  His
preacher repeated the prophecy, and his bards sang,--


"Children, we all shall be free
When the Lord shall appear!"


This deep religious fatalism, painted so beautifully in "Un-
cle Tom," came soon to breed, as all fatalistic faiths will, the
sensualist side by side with the martyr.  Under the lax moral
life of the plantation, where marriage was a farce, laziness a
virtue, and property a theft, a religion of resignation and
submission degenerated easily, in less strenuous minds, into a
philosophy of indulgence and crime.  Many of the worst
characteristics of the Negro masses of to-day had their seed in
this period of the slave's ethical growth.  Here it was that the
Home was ruined under the very shadow of the Church,
white and black; here habits of shiftlessness took root, and
sullen hopelessness replaced hopeful strife.

With the beginning of the abolition movement and the
gradual growth of a class of free Negroes came a change.  We
often neglect the influence of the freedman before the war,
because of the paucity of his numbers and the small weight he
had in the history of the nation.  But we must not forget that
his chief influence was internal,--was exerted on the black
world; and that there he was the ethical and social leader.
Huddled as he was in a few centres like Philadelphia, New
York, and New Orleans, the masses of the freedmen sank
into poverty and listlessness; but not all of them.  The free
Negro leader early arose and his chief characteristic was
intense earnestness and deep feeling on the slavery question.
Freedom became to him a real thing and not a dream.  His
religion became darker and more intense, and into his ethics
crept a note of revenge, into his songs a day of reckoning
close at hand.  The "Coming of the Lord" swept this side of
Death, and came to be a thing to be hoped for in this day.
Through fugitive slaves and irrepressible discussion this de-
sire for freedom seized the black millions still in bondage,
and became their one ideal of life.  The black bards caught
new notes, and sometimes even dared to sing,--


"O Freedom, O Freedom, O Freedom over me!
Before I'll be a slave
I'll be buried in my grave,
And go home to my Lord
And be free."


For fifty years Negro religion thus transformed itself and
identified itself with the dream of Abolition, until that which
was a radical fad in the white North and an anarchistic plot in
the white South had become a religion to the black world.
Thus, when Emancipation finally came, it seemed to the
freedman a literal Coming of the Lord.  His fervid imagination
was stirred as never before, by the tramp of armies, the blood
and dust of battle, and the wail and whirl of social upheaval.
He stood dumb and motionless before the whirlwind: what
had he to do with it?  Was it not the Lord's doing, and
marvellous in his eyes?  Joyed and bewildered with what
came, he stood awaiting new wonders till the inevitable Age
of Reaction swept over the nation and brought the crisis of
to-day.

It is difficult to explain clearly the present critical stage of
Negro religion.  First, we must remember that living as the
blacks do in close contact with a great modern nation, and
sharing, although imperfectly, the soul-life of that nation,
they must necessarily be affected more or less directly by all
the religious and ethical forces that are to-day moving the
United States.  These questions and movements are, however,
overshadowed and dwarfed by the (to them) all-important
question of their civil, political, and economic status.  They
must perpetually discuss the "Negro Problem,"--must live,
move, and have their being in it, and interpret all else in its
light or darkness.  With this come, too, peculiar problems of
their inner life,--of the status of women, the maintenance of
Home, the training of children, the accumulation of wealth,
and the prevention of crime.  All this must mean a time of
intense ethical ferment, of religious heart-searching and intel-
lectual unrest.  From the double life every American Negro
must live, as a Negro and as an American, as swept on by the
current of the nineteenth while yet struggling in the eddies of
the fifteenth century,--from this must arise a painful self-
consciousness, an almost morbid sense of personality and a
moral hesitancy which is fatal to self-confidence.  The worlds
within and without the Veil of Color are changing, and
changing rapidly, but not at the same rate, not in the same
way; and this must produce a peculiar wrenching of the soul,
a peculiar sense of doubt and bewilderment.  Such a double
life, with double thoughts, double duties, and double social
classes, must give rise to double words and double ideals,
and tempt the mind to pretence or revolt, to hypocrisy or
radicalism.

In some such doubtful words and phrases can one perhaps
most clearly picture the peculiar ethical paradox that faces the
Negro of to-day and is tingeing and changing his religious
life.  Feeling that his rights and his dearest ideals are being
trampled upon, that the public conscience is ever more deaf
to his righteous appeal, and that all the reactionary forces of
prejudice, greed, and revenge are daily gaining new strength
and fresh allies, the Negro faces no enviable dilemma.  Con-
scious of his impotence, and pessimistic, he often becomes
bitter and vindictive; and his religion, instead of a worship, is
a complaint and a curse, a wail rather than a hope, a sneer
rather than a faith.  On the other hand, another type of mind,
shrewder and keener and more tortuous too, sees in the very
strength of the anti-Negro movement its patent weaknesses,
and with Jesuitic casuistry is deterred by no ethical considera-
tions in the endeavor to turn this weakness to the black man's
strength.  Thus we have two great and hardly reconcilable
streams of thought and ethical strivings; the danger of the one
lies in anarchy, that of the other in hypocrisy.  The one type
of Negro stands almost ready to curse God and die, and the
other is too often found a traitor to right and a coward before
force; the one is wedded to ideals remote, whimsical, perhaps
impossible of realization; the other forgets that life is more
than meat and the body more than raiment.  But, after all, is
not this simply the writhing of the age translated into black,--
the triumph of the Lie which today, with its false culture,
faces the hideousness of the anarchist assassin?

To-day the two groups of Negroes, the one in the North,
the other in the South, represent these divergent ethical tend-
encies, the first tending toward radicalism, the other toward
hypocritical compromise.  It is no idle regret with which the
white South mourns the loss of the old-time Negro,--the
frank, honest, simple old servant who stood for the earlier
religious age of submission and humility.  With all his lazi-
ness and lack of many elements of true manhood, he was at
least open-hearted, faithful, and sincere.  To-day he is gone,
but who is to blame for his going?  Is it not those very persons
who mourn for him?  Is it not the tendency, born of Recon-
struction and Reaction, to found a society on lawlessness and
deception, to tamper with the moral fibre of a naturally
honest and straightforward people until the whites threaten to
become ungovernable tyrants and the blacks criminals and
hypocrites?  Deception is the natural defence of the weak
against the strong, and the South used it for many years
against its conquerors; to-day it must be prepared to see its
black proletariat turn that same two-edged weapon against
itself.  And how natural this is!  The death of Denmark Vesey
and Nat Turner proved long since to the Negro the present
hopelessness of physical defence.  Political defence is becom-
ing less and less available, and economic defence is still only
partially effective.  But there is a patent defence at hand,--the
defence of deception and flattery, of cajoling and lying.  It is
the same defence which peasants of the Middle Age used and
which left its stamp on their character for centuries.  To-day
the young Negro of the South who would succeed cannot be
frank and outspoken, honest and self-assertive, but rather he
is daily tempted to be silent and wary, politic and sly; he
must flatter and be pleasant, endure petty insults with a smile,
shut his eyes to wrong; in too many cases he sees positive
personal advantage in deception and lying.  His real thoughts,
his real aspirations, must be guarded in whispers; he must not
criticise, he must not complain.  Patience, humility, and adroit-
ness must, in these growing black youth, replace impulse,
manliness, and courage.  With this sacrifice there is an eco-
nomic opening, and perhaps peace and some prosperity.  With-
out this there is riot, migration, or crime.  Nor is this situation
peculiar to the Southern United States, is it not rather the only
method by which undeveloped races have gained the right to
share modern culture?  The price of culture is a Lie.

On the other hand, in the North the tendency is to empha-
size the radicalism of the Negro.  Driven from his birthright in
the South by a situation at which every fibre of his more
outspoken and assertive nature revolts, he finds himself in a
land where he can scarcely earn a decent living amid the
harsh competition and the color discrimination.  At the same
time, through schools and periodicals, discussions and lec-
tures, he is intellectually quickened and awakened.  The soul,
long pent up and dwarfed, suddenly expands in new-found
freedom.  What wonder that every tendency is to excess,--
radical complaint, radical remedies, bitter denunciation
or angry silence.  Some sink, some rise.  The criminal and
the sensualist leave the church for the gambling-hell
and the brothel, and fill the slums of Chicago and Baltimore;
the better classes segregate themselves from the group-life of
both white and black, and form an aristocracy, cultured but
pessimistic, whose bitter criticism stings while it points out
no way of escape.  They despise the submission and sub-
serviency of the Southern Negroes, but offer no other means
by which a poor and oppressed minority can exist side by side
with its masters.  Feeling deeply and keenly the tendencies
and opportunities of the age in which they live, their souls are
bitter at the fate which drops the Veil between; and the very
fact that this bitterness is natural and justifiable only serves to
intensify it and make it more maddening.

Between the two extreme types of ethical attitude which I
have thus sought to make clear wavers the mass of the
millions of Negroes, North and South; and their religious life
and activity partake of this social conflict within their ranks.
Their churches are differentiating,--now into groups of cold,
fashionable devotees, in no way distinguishable from similar
white groups save in color of skin; now into large social and
business institutions catering to the desire for information and
amusement of their members, warily avoiding unpleasant
questions both within and without the black world, and preach-
ing in effect if not in word: Dum vivimus, vivamus.

But back of this still broods silently the deep religious
feeling of the real Negro heart, the stirring, unguided might
of powerful human souls who have lost the guiding star of the
past and seek in the great night a new religious ideal.  Some
day the Awakening will come, when the pent-up vigor of ten
million souls shall sweep irresistibly toward the Goal, out of
the Valley of the Shadow of Death, where all that makes life
worth living--Liberty, Justice, and Right--is marked "For
White People Only."






XI

Of the Passing of the First-Born

O sister, sister, thy first-begotten,
The hands that cling and the feet that follow,
The voice of the child's blood crying yet,
WHO HATH REMEMBERED ME? WHO HATH FORGOTTEN?
Thou hast forgotten, O summer swallow,
But the world shall end when I forget.

SWINBURNE.


"Unto you a child is born," sang the bit of yellow paper that
fluttered into my room one brown October morning.  Then the
fear of fatherhood mingled wildly with the joy of creation; I
wondered how it looked and how it felt--what were its eyes,
and how its hair curled and crumpled itself.  And I thought in
awe of her,--she who had slept with Death to tear a man-child
from underneath her heart, while I was unconsciously wan-
dering.  I fled to my wife and child, repeating the while to
myself half wonderingly, "Wife and child?  Wife and child?"--
fled fast and faster than boat and steam-car, and yet must ever
impatiently await them; away from the hard-voiced city, away
from the flickering sea into my own Berkshire Hills that sit
all sadly guarding the gates of Massachusetts.

Up the stairs I ran to the wan mother and whimpering
babe, to the sanctuary on whose altar a life at my bidding had
offered itself to win a life, and won.  What is this tiny
formless thing, this newborn wail from an unknown world,
--all head and voice?  I handle it curiously, and watch per-
plexed its winking, breathing, and sneezing.  I did not love it
then; it seemed a ludicrous thing to love; but her I loved, my
girl-mother, she whom now I saw unfolding like the glory of
the morning--the transfigured woman.  Through her I came to
love the wee thing, as it grew strong; as its little soul un-
folded itself in twitter and cry and half-formed word, and as
its eyes caught the gleam and flash of life.  How beautiful he
was, with his olive-tinted flesh and dark gold ringlets, his
eyes of mingled blue and brown, his perfect little limbs, and
the soft voluptuous roll which the blood of Africa had moulded
into his features!  I held him in my arms, after we had sped
far away from our Southern home,--held him, and glanced
at the hot red soil of Georgia and the breathless city of a
hundred hills, and felt a vague unrest.  Why was his hair
tinted with gold?  An evil omen was golden hair in my life.
Why had not the brown of his eyes crushed out and killed the
blue?--for brown were his father's eyes, and his father's
father's.  And thus in the Land of the Color-line I saw, as it
fell across my baby, the shadow of the Veil.

Within the Veil was he born, said I; and there within shall
he live,--a Negro and a Negro's son.  Holding in that little
head--ah, bitterly!--he unbowed pride of a hunted race,
clinging with that tiny dimpled hand--ah, wearily!--to a hope
not hopeless but unhopeful, and seeing with those bright
wondering eyes that peer into my soul a land whose freedom
is to us a mockery and whose liberty a lie.  I saw the shadow
of the Veil as it passed over my baby, I saw the cold city
towering above the blood-red land.  I held my face beside his
little cheek, showed him the star-children and the twinkling
lights as they began to flash, and stilled with an even-song
the unvoiced terror of my life.

So sturdy and masterful he grew, so filled with bubbling
life, so tremulous with the unspoken wisdom of a life but
eighteen months distant from the All-life,--we were not far
from worshipping this revelation of the divine, my wife and
I. Her own life builded and moulded itself upon the child; he
tinged her every dream and idealized her every effort.  No
hands but hers must touch and garnish those little limbs; no
dress or frill must touch them that had not wearied her
fingers; no voice but hers could coax him off to Dreamland,
and she and he together spoke some soft and unknown tongue
and in it held communion.  I too mused above his little white
bed; saw the strength of my own arm stretched onward
through the ages through the newer strength of his; saw the
dream of my black fathers stagger a step onward in the wild
phantasm of the world; heard in his baby voice the voice of
the Prophet that was to rise within the Veil.

And so we dreamed and loved and planned by fall and
winter, and the full flush of the long Southern spring, till the
hot winds rolled from the fetid Gulf, till the roses shivered
and the still stern sun quivered its awful light over the hills of
Atlanta.  And then one night the little feet pattered wearily to
the wee white bed, and the tiny hands trembled; and a warm
flushed face tossed on the pillow, and we knew baby was
sick.  Ten days he lay there,--a swift week and three endless
days, wasting, wasting away.  Cheerily the mother nursed him
the first days, and laughed into the little eyes that smiled
again.  Tenderly then she hovered round him, till the smile
fled away and Fear crouched beside the little bed.

Then the day ended not, and night was a dreamless terror,
and joy and sleep slipped away.  I hear now that Voice at
midnight calling me from dull and dreamless trance,--crying,
"The Shadow of Death!  The Shadow of Death!"  Out into the
starlight I crept, to rouse the gray physician,--the Shadow of
Death, the Shadow of Death.  The hours trembled on; the
night listened; the ghastly dawn glided like a tired thing
across the lamplight.  Then we two alone looked upon the
child as he turned toward us with great eyes, and stretched his
stringlike hands,--the Shadow of Death!  And we spoke no
word, and turned away.

He died at eventide, when the sun lay like a brooding
sorrow above the western hills, veiling its face; when the
winds spoke not, and the trees, the great green trees he loved,
stood motionless.  I saw his breath beat quicker and quicker,
pause, and then his little soul leapt like a star that travels in
the night and left a world of darkness in its train.  The day
changed not; the same tall trees peeped in at the windows, the
same green grass glinted in the setting sun.  Only in the
chamber of death writhed the world's most piteous thing--a
childless mother.

I shirk not.  I long for work.  I pant for a life full of striving.
I am no coward, to shrink before the rugged rush of the
storm, nor even quail before the awful shadow of the Veil.
But hearken, O Death!  Is not this my life hard enough,--is
not that dull land that stretches its sneering web about me
cold enough,--is not all the world beyond these four little
walls pitiless enough, but that thou must needs enter here,
--thou, O Death?  About my head the thundering storm beat
like a heartless voice, and the crazy forest pulsed with the
curses of the weak; but what cared I, within my home beside
my wife and baby boy?  Wast thou so jealous of one little
coign of happiness that thou must needs enter there,--thou, O
Death?

A perfect life was his, all joy and love, with tears to make
it brighter,--sweet as a summer's day beside the Housatonic.
The world loved him; the women kissed his curls, the men
looked gravely into his wonderful eyes, and the children
hovered and fluttered about him.  I can see him now, chang-
ing like the sky from sparkling laughter to darkening frowns,
and then to wondering thoughtfulness as he watched the world.
He knew no color-line, poor dear--and the Veil, though it
shadowed him, had not yet darkened half his sun.  He loved
the white matron, he loved his black nurse; and in his little
world walked souls alone, uncolored and unclothed.  I--yea,
all men--are larger and purer by the infinite breadth of that
one little life.  She who in simple clearness of vision sees
beyond the stars said when he had flown, "He will be happy
There; he ever loved beautiful things."  And I, far more
ignorant, and blind by the web of mine own weaving, sit
alone winding words and muttering, "If still he be, and he be
There, and there be a There, let him be happy, O Fate!"

Blithe was the morning of his burial, with bird and song
and sweet-smelling flowers.  The trees whispered to the grass,
but the children sat with hushed faces.  And yet it seemed a
ghostly unreal day,--the wraith of Life.  We seemed to rum-
ble down an unknown street behind a little white bundle of
posies, with the shadow of a song in our ears.  The busy city
dinned about us; they did not say much, those pale-faced
hurrying men and women; they did not say much,--they
only glanced and said, "Niggers!"

We could not lay him in the ground there in Georgia, for
the earth there is strangely red; so we bore him away to the
northward, with his flowers and his little folded hands.  In
vain, in vain!--for where, O God! beneath thy broad blue sky
shall my dark baby rest in peace,--where Reverence dwells,
and Goodness, and a Freedom that is free?

All that day and all that night there sat an awful gladness in
my heart,--nay, blame me not if I see the world thus darkly
through the Veil,--and my soul whispers ever to me saying,
"Not dead, not dead, but escaped; not bond, but free."  No
bitter meanness now shall sicken his baby heart till it die a
living death, no taunt shall madden his happy boyhood.  Fool
that I was to think or wish that this little soul should grow
choked and deformed within the Veil!  I might have known
that yonder deep unworldly look that ever and anon floated
past his eyes was peering far beyond this narrow Now.  In the
poise of his little curl-crowned head did there not sit all that
wild pride of being which his father had hardly crushed in his
own heart?  For what, forsooth, shall a Negro want with pride
amid the studied humiliations of fifty million fellows?  Well
sped, my boy, before the world had dubbed your ambition
insolence, had held your ideals unattainable, and taught you
to cringe and bow.  Better far this nameless void that stops my
life than a sea of sorrow for you.

Idle words; he might have borne his burden more bravely
than we,--aye, and found it lighter too, some day; for surely,
surely this is not the end.  Surely there shall yet dawn some
mighty morning to lift the Veil and set the prisoned free.  Not
for me,--I shall die in my bonds,--but for fresh young souls
who have not known the night and waken to the morning; a
morning when men ask of the workman, not "Is he white?"
but "Can he work?"  When men ask artists, not "Are they
black?" but "Do they know?"  Some morning this may be,
long, long years to come.  But now there wails, on that dark
shore within the Veil, the same deep voice, THOU SHALT FOREGO!
And all have I foregone at that command, and with small
complaint,--all save that fair young form that lies so coldly
wed with death in the nest I had builded.

If one must have gone, why not I?  Why may I not rest me
from this restlessness and sleep from this wide waking?  Was
not the world's alembic, Time, in his young hands, and is not
my time waning?  Are there so many workers in the vineyard
that the fair promise of this little body could lightly be tossed
away?  The wretched of my race that line the alleys of the
nation sit fatherless and unmothered; but Love sat beside
his cradle, and in his ear Wisdom waited to speak.  Perhaps
now he knows the All-love, and needs not to be wise.  Sleep,
then, child,--sleep till I sleep and waken to a baby voice and
the ceaseless patter of little feet--above the Veil.






XII

Of Alexander Crummell

Then from the Dawn it seemed there came, but faint
As from beyond the limit of the world,
Like the last echo born of a great cry,
Sounds, as if some fair city were one voice
Around a king returning from his wars.

TENNYSON.


This is the story of a human heart,--the tale of a black boy
who many long years ago began to struggle with life that he
might know the world and know himself.  Three temptations
he met on those dark dunes that lay gray and dismal before
the wonder-eyes of the child: the temptation of Hate, that
stood out against the red dawn; the temptation of Despair,
that darkened noonday; and the temptation of Doubt, that
ever steals along with twilight.  Above all, you must hear of
the vales he crossed,--the Valley of Humiliation and the
Valley of the Shadow of Death.

I saw Alexander Crummell first at a Wilberforce com-
mencement season, amid its bustle and crush.  Tall, frail, and
black he stood, with simple dignity and an unmistakable air
of good breeding.  I talked with him apart, where the storming
of the lusty young orators could not harm us.  I spoke to him
politely, then curiously, then eagerly, as I began to feel the
fineness of his character,--his calm courtesy, the sweetness
of his strength, and his fair blending of the hope and truth of
life.  Instinctively I bowed before this man, as one bows before
the prophets of the world.  Some seer he seemed, that came
not from the crimson Past or the gray To-come, but from the
pulsing Now,--that mocking world which seemed to me at
once so light and dark, so splendid and sordid.  Fourscore
years had he wandered in this same world of mine, within the
Veil.

He was born with the Missouri Compromise and lay a-dying
amid the echoes of Manila and El Caney: stirring times for
living, times dark to look back upon, darker to look forward
to. The black-faced lad that paused over his mud and marbles
seventy years ago saw puzzling vistas as he looked down the
world.  The slave-ship still groaned across the Atlantic, faint
cries burdened the Southern breeze, and the great black father
whispered mad tales of cruelty into those young ears.  From
the low doorway the mother silently watched her boy at play,
and at nightfall sought him eagerly lest the shadows bear him
away to the land of slaves.

So his young mind worked and winced and shaped curi-
ously a vision of Life; and in the midst of that vision ever
stood one dark figure alone,--ever with the hard, thick coun-
tenance of that bitter father, and a form that fell in vast and
shapeless folds.  Thus the temptation of Hate grew and shad-
owed the growing child,--gliding stealthily into his laughter,
fading into his play, and seizing his dreams by day and night
with rough, rude turbulence.  So the black boy asked of sky
and sun and flower the never-answered Why? and loved, as
he grew, neither the world nor the world's rough ways.

Strange temptation for a child, you may think; and yet in
this wide land to-day a thousand thousand dark children
brood before this same temptation, and feel its cold and
shuddering arms.  For them, perhaps, some one will some day
lift the Veil,--will come tenderly and cheerily into those sad
little lives and brush the brooding hate away, just as Beriah
Green strode in upon the life of Alexander Crummell.  And
before the bluff, kind-hearted man the shadow seemed less
dark.  Beriah Green had a school in Oneida County, New
York, with a score of mischievous boys.  "I'm going to bring
a black boy here to educate," said Beriah Green, as only a
crank and an abolitionist would have dared to say.  "Oho!"
laughed the boys.  "Ye-es," said his wife; and Alexander
came.  Once before, the black boy had sought a school, had
travelled, cold and hungry, four hundred miles up into free
New Hampshire, to Canaan.  But the godly farmers hitched
ninety yoke of oxen to the abolition schoolhouse and dragged
it into the middle of the swamp.  The black boy trudged away.

The nineteenth was the first century of human sympathy,--
the age when half wonderingly we began to descry in others
that transfigured spark of divinity which we call Myself;
when clodhoppers and peasants, and tramps and thieves, and
millionaires and--sometimes--Negroes, became throbbing souls
whose warm pulsing life touched us so nearly that we half
gasped with surprise, crying, "Thou too!  Hast Thou seen
Sorrow and the dull waters of Hopelessness?  Hast Thou
known Life?"  And then all helplessly we peered into those
Other-worlds, and wailed, "O World of Worlds, how shall
man make you one?"

So in that little Oneida school there came to those school-
boys a revelation of thought and longing beneath one black
skin, of which they had not dreamed before.  And to the
lonely boy came a new dawn of sympathy and inspiration.
The shadowy, formless thing--the temptation of Hate, that
hovered between him and the world--grew fainter and less
sinister.  It did not wholly fade away, but diffused itself and
lingered thick at the edges.  Through it the child now first saw
the blue and gold of life,--the sun-swept road that ran 'twixt
heaven and earth until in one far-off wan wavering line they
met and kissed.  A vision of life came to the growing boy,
--mystic, wonderful.  He raised his head, stretched himself,
breathed deep of the fresh new air.  Yonder, behind the
forests, he heard strange sounds; then glinting through the
trees he saw, far, far away, the bronzed hosts of a nation
calling,--calling faintly, calling loudly.  He heard the hateful
clank of their chains; he felt them cringe and grovel, and
there rose within him a protest and a prophecy.  And he girded
himself to walk down the world.

A voice and vision called him to be a priest,--a seer to
lead the uncalled out of the house of bondage.  He saw the
headless host turn toward him like the whirling of mad
waters,--he stretched forth his hands eagerly, and then, even
as he stretched them, suddenly there swept across the vision
the temptation of Despair.

They were not wicked men,--the problem of life is not the
problem of the wicked,--they were calm, good men, Bishops
of the Apostolic Church of God, and strove toward righteous-
ness.  They said slowly, "It is all very natural--it is even
commendable; but the General Theological Seminary of the
Episcopal Church cannot admit a Negro."  And when that
thin, half-grotesque figure still haunted their doors, they put
their hands kindly, half sorrowfully, on his shoulders, and
said, "Now,--of course, we--we know how YOU feel about
it; but you see it is impossible,--that is--well--it is prema-
ture.  Sometime, we trust--sincerely trust--all such distinc-
tions will fade away; but now the world is as it is."

This was the temptation of Despair; and the young man
fought it doggedly.  Like some grave shadow he flitted by
those halls, pleading, arguing, half angrily demanding admit-
tance, until there came the final NO: until men hustled the
disturber away, marked him as foolish, unreasonable, and
injudicious, a vain rebel against God's law.  And then from
that Vision Splendid all the glory faded slowly away, and left
an earth gray and stern rolling on beneath a dark despair.
Even the kind hands that stretched themselves toward him
from out the depths of that dull morning seemed but parts of
the purple shadows.  He saw them coldly, and asked, "Why
should I strive by special grace when the way of the world is
closed to me?"  All gently yet, the hands urged him on,--the
hands of young John Jay, that daring father's daring son; the
hands of the good folk of Boston, that free city.  And yet,
with a way to the priesthood of the Church open at last before
him, the cloud lingered there; and even when in old St. Paul's
the venerable Bishop raised his white arms above the Negro
deacon--even then the burden had not lifted from that heart,
for there had passed a glory from the earth.

And yet the fire through which Alexander Crummell went
did not burn in vain.  Slowly and more soberly he took up
again his plan of life.  More critically he studied the situation.
Deep down below the slavery and servitude of the Negro
people he saw their fatal weaknesses, which long years of
mistreatment had emphasized.  The dearth of strong moral
character, of unbending righteousness, he felt, was their great
shortcoming, and here he would begin.  He would gather the
best of his people into some little Episcopal chapel and there
lead, teach, and inspire them, till the leaven spread, till the
children grew, till the world hearkened, till--till--and then
across his dream gleamed some faint after-glow of that first
fair vision of youth--only an after-glow, for there had passed
a glory from the earth.

One day--it was in 1842, and the springtide was struggling
merrily with the May winds of New England--he stood at
last in his own chapel in Providence, a priest of the Church.
The days sped by, and the dark young clergyman labored; he
wrote his sermons carefully; he intoned his prayers with a
soft, earnest voice; he haunted the streets and accosted the
wayfarers; he visited the sick, and knelt beside the dying.  He
worked and toiled, week by week, day by day, month by
month.  And yet month by month the congregation dwindled,
week by week the hollow walls echoed more sharply, day by
day the calls came fewer and fewer, and day by day the third
temptation sat clearer and still more clearly within the Veil; a
temptation, as it were, bland and smiling, with just a shade of
mockery in its smooth tones.  First it came casually, in the
cadence of a voice: "Oh, colored folks?  Yes."  Or perhaps
more definitely: "What do you EXPECT?" In voice and gesture
lay the doubt--the temptation of Doubt.  How he hated it, and
stormed at it furiously!  "Of course they are capable," he
cried; "of course they can learn and strive and achieve--"
and "Of course," added the temptation softly, "they do
nothing of the sort."  Of all the three temptations, this one
struck the deepest.  Hate?  He had outgrown so childish a
thing.  Despair?  He had steeled his right arm against it, and
fought it with the vigor of determination.  But to doubt the
worth of his life-work,--to doubt the destiny and capability
of the race his soul loved because it was his; to find listless
squalor instead of eager endeavor; to hear his own lips whisper-
ing, "They do not care; they cannot know; they are dumb
driven cattle,--why cast your pearls before swine?"--this,
this seemed more than man could bear; and he closed the
door, and sank upon the steps of the chancel, and cast his
robe upon the floor and writhed.

The evening sunbeams had set the dust to dancing in the
gloomy chapel when he arose.  He folded his vestments, put
away the hymn-books, and closed the great Bible.  He stepped
out into the twilight, looked back upon the narrow little pulpit
with a weary smile, and locked the door.  Then he walked
briskly to the Bishop, and told the Bishop what the Bishop
already knew.  "I have failed," he said simply.  And gaining
courage by the confession, he added: "What I need is a larger
constituency.  There are comparatively few Negroes here, and
perhaps they are not of the best.  I must go where the field is
wider, and try again."  So the Bishop sent him to Philadel-
phia, with a letter to Bishop Onderdonk.

Bishop Onderdonk lived at the head of six white steps,--
corpulent, red-faced, and the author of several thrilling tracts
on Apostolic Succession.  It was after dinner, and the Bishop
had settled himself for a pleasant season of contemplation,
when the bell must needs ring, and there must burst in upon
the Bishop a letter and a thin, ungainly Negro.  Bishop
Onderdonk read the letter hastily and frowned.  Fortunately,
his mind was already clear on this point; and he cleared his
brow and looked at Crummell.  Then he said, slowly and
impressively: "I will receive you into this diocese on one
condition: no Negro priest can sit in my church convention,
and no Negro church must ask for representation there."

I sometimes fancy I can see that tableau: the frail black
figure, nervously twitching his hat before the massive abdo-
men of Bishop Onderdonk; his threadbare coat thrown against
the dark woodwork of the bookcases, where Fox's "Lives of
the Martyrs" nestled happily beside "The Whole Duty of
Man."  I seem to see the wide eyes of the Negro wander past
the Bishop's broadcloth to where the swinging glass doors of
the cabinet glow in the sunlight.  A little blue fly is trying to
cross the yawning keyhole.  He marches briskly up to it, peers
into the chasm in a surprised sort of way, and rubs his feelers
reflectively; then he essays its depths, and, finding it bottom-
less, draws back again.  The dark-faced priest finds himself
wondering if the fly too has faced its Valley of Humiliation,
and if it will plunge into it,--when lo! it spreads its tiny
wings and buzzes merrily across, leaving the watcher wing-
less and alone.

Then the full weight of his burden fell upon him.  The rich
walls wheeled away, and before him lay the cold rough moor
winding on through life, cut in twain by one thick granite
ridge,--here, the Valley of Humiliation; yonder, the Valley
of the Shadow of Death.  And I know not which be darker,--no,
not I. But this I know: in yonder Vale of the Humble stand
to-day a million swarthy men, who willingly would

  " . . . bear the whips and scorns of time,
  The oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely,
  The pangs of despised love, the law's delay,
  The insolence of office, and the spurns
  That patient merit of the unworthy takes,"--

all this and more would they bear did they but know that this
were sacrifice and not a meaner thing.  So surged the thought
within that lone black breast.  The Bishop cleared his throat
suggestively; then, recollecting that there was really nothing
to say, considerately said nothing, only sat tapping his foot
impatiently.  But Alexander Crummell said, slowly and heav-
ily: "I will never enter your diocese on such terms."  And
saying this, he turned and passed into the Valley of the
Shadow of Death.  You might have noted only the physical
dying, the shattered frame and hacking cough; but in that soul
lay deeper death than that.  He found a chapel in New York,--
the church of his father; he labored for it in poverty and
starvation, scorned by his fellow priests.  Half in despair, he
wandered across the sea, a beggar with outstretched hands.
Englishmen clasped them,--Wilberforce and Stanley, Thirwell
and Ingles, and even Froude and Macaulay; Sir Benjamin
Brodie bade him rest awhile at Queen's College in Cam-
bridge, and there he lingered, struggling for health of body
and mind, until he took his degree in '53.  Restless still, and
unsatisfied, he turned toward Africa, and for long years, amid
the spawn of the slave-smugglers, sought a new heaven and a
new earth.

So the man groped for light; all this was not Life,--it was
the world-wandering of a soul in search of itself, the striving
of one who vainly sought his place in the world, ever haunted
by the shadow of a death that is more than death,--the
passing of a soul that has missed its duty.  Twenty years he
wandered,--twenty years and more; and yet the hard rasping
question kept gnawing within him, "What, in God's name,
am I on earth for?"  In the narrow New York parish his soul
seemed cramped and smothered.  In the fine old air of the
English University he heard the millions wailing over the sea.
In the wild fever-cursed swamps of West Africa he stood
helpless and alone.

You will not wonder at his weird pilgrimage,--you who in
the swift whirl of living, amid its cold paradox and marvel-
lous vision, have fronted life and asked its riddle face to face.
And if you find that riddle hard to read, remember that
yonder black boy finds it just a little harder; if it is difficult
for you to find and face your duty, it is a shade more difficult
for him; if your heart sickens in the blood and dust of battle,
remember that to him the dust is thicker and the battle fiercer.
No wonder the wanderers fall!  No wonder we point to thief
and murderer, and haunting prostitute, and the never-ending
throng of unhearsed dead!  The Valley of the Shadow of
Death gives few of its pilgrims back to the world.

But Alexander Crummell it gave back.  Out of the tempta-
tion of Hate, and burned by the fire of Despair, triumphant
over Doubt, and steeled by Sacrifice against Humiliation, he
turned at last home across the waters, humble and strong,
gentle and determined.  He bent to all the gibes and prejudices,
to all hatred and discrimination, with that rare courtesy which
is the armor of pure souls.  He fought among his own, the
low, the grasping, and the wicked, with that unbending
righteousness which is the sword of the just.  He never fal-
tered, he seldom complained; he simply worked, inspiring the
young, rebuking the old, helping the weak, guiding the strong.

So he grew, and brought within his wide influence all that
was best of those who walk within the Veil.  They who live
without knew not nor dreamed of that full power within, that
mighty inspiration which the dull gauze of caste decreed that
most men should not know.  And now that he is gone, I sweep
the Veil away and cry, Lo! the soul to whose dear memory I
bring this little tribute.  I can see his face still, dark and
heavy-lined beneath his snowy hair; lighting and shading,
now with inspiration for the future, now in innocent pain at
some human wickedness, now with sorrow at some hard
memory from the past.  The more I met Alexander Crummell,
the more I felt how much that world was losing which knew
so little of him.  In another age he might have sat among the
elders of the land in purple-bordered toga; in another country
mothers might have sung him to the cradles.

He did his work,--he did it nobly and well; and yet I
sorrow that here he worked alone, with so little human sym-
pathy.  His name to-day, in this broad land, means little, and
comes to fifty million ears laden with no incense of memory
or emulation.  And herein lies the tragedy of the age: not that
men are poor,--all men know something of poverty; not that
men are wicked,--who is good? not that men are ignorant,--
what is Truth?  Nay, but that men know so little of men.


He sat one morning gazing toward the sea.  He smiled and
said, "The gate is rusty on the hinges."  That night at star-
rise a wind came moaning out of the west to blow the gate
ajar, and then the soul I loved fled like a flame across the
Seas, and in its seat sat Death.

I wonder where he is to-day?  I wonder if in that dim world
beyond, as he came gliding in, there rose on some wan throne
a King,--a dark and pierced Jew, who knows the writhings
of the earthly damned, saying, as he laid those heart-wrung
talents down, "Well done!" while round about the morning
stars sat singing.






XIII

Of the Coming of John

What bring they 'neath the midnight,
  Beside the River-sea?
They bring the human heart wherein
  No nightly calm can be;
That droppeth never with the wind,
  Nor drieth with the dew;
O calm it, God; thy calm is broad
  To cover spirits too.

 The river floweth on.

MRS. BROWNING.


Carlisle Street runs westward from the centre of Johnstown,
across a great black bridge, down a hill and up again, by little
shops and meat-markets, past single-storied homes, until sud-
denly it stops against a wide green lawn.  It is a broad, restful
place, with two large buildings outlined against the west.
When at evening the winds come swelling from the east, and
the great pall of the city's smoke hangs wearily above the
valley, then the red west glows like a dreamland down Car-
lisle Street, and, at the tolling of the supper-bell, throws the
passing forms of students in dark silhouette against the sky.
Tall and black, they move slowly by, and seem in the sinister
light to flit before the city like dim warning ghosts.  Perhaps
they are; for this is Wells Institute, and these black students
have few dealings with the white city below.

And if you will notice, night after night, there is one dark
form that ever hurries last and late toward the twinkling lights
of Swain Hall,--for Jones is never on time.  A long, strag-
gling fellow he is, brown and hard-haired, who seems to be
growing straight out of his clothes, and walks with a half-
apologetic roll.  He used perpetually to set the quiet dining-
room into waves of merriment, as he stole to his place after
the bell had tapped for prayers; he seemed so perfectly awk-
ward.  And yet one glance at his face made one forgive him
much,--that broad, good-natured smile in which lay no bit of
art or artifice, but seemed just bubbling good-nature and
genuine satisfaction with the world.

He came to us from Altamaha, away down there beneath
the gnarled oaks of Southeastern Georgia, where the sea
croons to the sands and the sands listen till they sink half
drowned beneath the waters, rising only here and there in
long, low islands.  The white folk of Altamaha voted John a
good boy,--fine plough-hand, good in the rice-fields, handy
everywhere, and always good-natured and respectful.  But
they shook their heads when his mother wanted to send him
off to school.  "It'll spoil him,--ruin him," they said; and
they talked as though they knew.  But full half the black folk
followed him proudly to the station, and carried his queer
little trunk and many bundles.  And there they shook and
shook hands, and the girls kissed him shyly and the boys
clapped him on the back.  So the train came, and he pinched
his little sister lovingly, and put his great arms about his
mother's neck, and then was away with a puff and a roar into
the great yellow world that flamed and flared about the
doubtful pilgrim.  Up the coast they hurried, past the squares
and palmettos of Savannah, through the cotton-fields and
through the weary night, to Millville, and came with the
morning to the noise and bustle of Johnstown.

And they that stood behind, that morning in Altamaha, and
watched the train as it noisily bore playmate and brother and
son away to the world, had thereafter one ever-recurring
word,--"When John comes."  Then what parties were to be,
and what speakings in the churches; what new furniture in the
front room,--perhaps even a new front room; and there would
be a new schoolhouse, with John as teacher; and then perhaps
a big wedding; all this and more--when John comes.  But the
white people shook their heads.

At first he was coming at Christmas-time,--but the vaca-
tion proved too short; and then, the next summer,--but times
were hard and schooling costly, and so, instead, he worked in
Johnstown.  And so it drifted to the next summer, and the
next,--till playmates scattered, and mother grew gray, and
sister went up to the Judge's kitchen to work.  And still the
legend lingered,--"When John comes."

Up at the Judge's they rather liked this refrain; for they too
had a John--a fair-haired, smooth-faced boy, who had played
many a long summer's day to its close with his darker
namesake.  "Yes, sir!  John is at Princeton, sir," said the
broad-shouldered gray-haired Judge every morning as he
marched down to the post-office.  "Showing the Yankees
what a Southern gentleman can do," he added; and strode
home again with his letters and papers.  Up at the great
pillared house they lingered long over the Princeton letter,--
the Judge and his frail wife, his sister and growing daughters.
"It'll make a man of him," said the Judge, "college is the
place."  And then he asked the shy little waitress, "Well,
Jennie, how's your John?" and added reflectively, "Too bad,
too bad your mother sent him off--it will spoil him."  And
the waitress wondered.

Thus in the far-away Southern village the world lay waiting,
half consciously, the coming of two young men, and dreamed
in an inarticulate way of new things that would be done and
new thoughts that all would think.  And yet it was singular
that few thought of two Johns,--for the black folk thought of
one John, and he was black; and the white folk thought of
another John, and he was white.  And neither world thought
the other world's thought, save with a vague unrest.

Up in Johnstown, at the Institute, we were long puzzled at
the case of John Jones.  For a long time the clay seemed unfit
for any sort of moulding.  He was loud and boisterous, always
laughing and singing, and never able to work consecutively at
anything.  He did not know how to study; he had no idea of
thoroughness; and with his tardiness, carelessness, and appall-
ing good-humor, we were sore perplexed.  One night we sat in
faculty-meeting, worried and serious; for Jones was in trouble
again.  This last escapade was too much, and so we solemnly
voted "that Jones, on account of repeated disorder and inat-
tention to work, be suspended for the rest of the term."

It seemed to us that the first time life ever struck Jones as a
really serious thing was when the Dean told him he must
leave school.  He stared at the gray-haired man blankly, with
great eyes.  "Why,--why," he faltered, "but--I haven't grad-
uated!"  Then the Dean slowly and clearly explained, remind-
ing him of the tardiness and the carelessness, of the poor
lessons and neglected work, of the noise and disorder, until
the fellow hung his head in confusion.  Then he said quickly,
"But you won't tell mammy and sister,--you won't write
mammy, now will you?  For if you won't I'll go out into the
city and work, and come back next term and show you
something."  So the Dean promised faithfully, and John shoul-
dered his little trunk, giving neither word nor look to the
giggling boys, and walked down Carlisle Street to the great
city, with sober eyes and a set and serious face.

Perhaps we imagined it, but someway it seemed to us that
the serious look that crept over his boyish face that afternoon
never left it again.  When he came back to us he went to work
with all his rugged strength.  It was a hard struggle, for things
did not come easily to him,--few crowding memories of
early life and teaching came to help him on his new way; but
all the world toward which he strove was of his own building,
and he builded slow and hard.  As the light dawned linger-
ingly on his new creations, he sat rapt and silent before the
vision, or wandered alone over the green campus peering
through and beyond the world of men into a world of thought.
And the thoughts at times puzzled him sorely; he could not
see just why the circle was not square, and carried it out
fifty-six decimal places one midnight,--would have gone
further, indeed, had not the matron rapped for lights out.  He
caught terrible colds lying on his back in the meadows of
nights, trying to think out the solar system; he had grave
doubts as to the ethics of the Fall of Rome, and strongly
suspected the Germans of being thieves and rascals, despite
his textbooks; he pondered long over every new Greek word,
and wondered why this meant that and why it couldn't mean
something else, and how it must have felt to think all things
in Greek.  So he thought and puzzled along for himself,--
pausing perplexed where others skipped merrily, and walking
steadily through the difficulties where the rest stopped and
surrendered.

Thus he grew in body and soul, and with him his clothes
seemed to grow and arrange themselves; coat sleeves got
longer, cuffs appeared, and collars got less soiled.  Now and
then his boots shone, and a new dignity crept into his walk.
And we who saw daily a new thoughtfulness growing in his
eyes began to expect something of this plodding boy.  Thus he
passed out of the preparatory school into college, and we who
watched him felt four more years of change, which almost
transformed the tall, grave man who bowed to us commence-
ment morning.  He had left his queer thought-world and come
back to a world of motion and of men.  He looked now for the
first time sharply about him, and wondered he had seen so
little before.  He grew slowly to feel almost for the first time
the Veil that lay between him and the white world; he first
noticed now the oppression that had not seemed oppression
before, differences that erstwhile seemed natural, restraints
and slights that in his boyhood days had gone unnoticed or
been greeted with a laugh.  He felt angry now when men did
not call him "Mister," he clenched his hands at the "Jim
Crow" cars, and chafed at the color-line that hemmed in him
and his.  A tinge of sarcasm crept into his speech, and a vague
bitterness into his life; and he sat long hours wondering and
planning a way around these crooked things.  Daily he found
himself shrinking from the choked and narrow life of his
native town.  And yet he always planned to go back to
Altamaha,--always planned to work there.  Still, more and
more as the day approached he hesitated with a nameless
dread; and even the day after graduation he seized with
eagerness the offer of the Dean to send him North with the
quartette during the summer vacation, to sing for the Insti-
tute.  A breath of air before the plunge, he said to himself in
half apology.

It was a bright September afternoon, and the streets of New
York were brilliant with moving men.  They reminded John of
the sea, as he sat in the square and watched them, so change-
lessly changing, so bright and dark, so grave and gay.  He
scanned their rich and faultless clothes, the way they carried
their hands, the shape of their hats; he peered into the hurry-
ing carriages.  Then, leaning back with a sigh, he said, "This
is the World."  The notion suddenly seized him to see where
the world was going; since many of the richer and brighter
seemed hurrying all one way.  So when a tall, light-haired
young man and a little talkative lady came by, he rose half
hesitatingly and followed them.  Up the street they went,
past stores and gay shops, across a broad square, until
with a hundred others they entered the high portal of a great
building.

He was pushed toward the ticket-office with the others, and
felt in his pocket for the new five-dollar bill he had hoarded.
There seemed really no time for hesitation, so he drew it
bravely out, passed it to the busy clerk, and received simply a
ticket but no change.  When at last he realized that he had
paid five dollars to enter he knew not what, he stood stockstill
amazed.  "Be careful," said a low voice behind him; "you
must not lynch the colored gentleman simply because he's in
your way," and a girl looked up roguishly into the eyes of
her fair-haired escort.  A shade of annoyance passed over the
escort's face.  "You WILL not understand us at the South," he
said half impatiently, as if continuing an argument.  "With all
your professions, one never sees in the North so cordial and
intimate relations between white and black as are everyday
occurrences with us.  Why, I remember my closest playfellow
in boyhood was a little Negro named after me, and surely no
two,--WELL!" The man stopped short and flushed to the roots
of his hair, for there directly beside his reserved orchestra
chairs sat the Negro he had stumbled over in the hallway.  He
hesitated and grew pale with anger, called the usher and gave
him his card, with a few peremptory words, and slowly sat
down.  The lady deftly changed the subject.

All this John did not see, for he sat in a half-daze minding
the scene about him; the delicate beauty of the hall, the faint
perfume, the moving myriad of men, the rich clothing and
low hum of talking seemed all a part of a world so different
from his, so strangely more beautiful than anything he had
known, that he sat in dreamland, and started when, after a
hush, rose high and clear the music of Lohengrin's swan.  The
infinite beauty of the wail lingered and swept through every
muscle of his frame, and put it all a-tune.  He closed his eyes
and grasped the elbows of the chair, touching unwittingly the
lady's arm.  And the lady drew away.  A deep longing swelled
in all his heart to rise with that clear music out of the dirt and
dust of that low life that held him prisoned and befouled.  If
he could only live up in the free air where birds sang and
setting suns had no touch of blood!  Who had called him to be
the slave and butt of all?  And if he had called, what right had
he to call when a world like this lay open before men?

Then the movement changed, and fuller, mightier harmony
swelled away.  He looked thoughtfully across the hall, and
wondered why the beautiful gray-haired woman looked so
listless, and what the little man could be whispering about.  He
would not like to be listless and idle, he thought, for he felt
with the music the movement of power within him.  If he but
had some master-work, some life-service, hard,--aye, bitter
hard, but without the cringing and sickening servility, without
the cruel hurt that hardened his heart and soul.  When at last a
soft sorrow crept across the violins, there came to him the
vision of a far-off home, the great eyes of his sister, and
the dark drawn face of his mother.  And his heart sank below the
waters, even as the sea-sand sinks by the shores of Altamaha,
only to be lifted aloft again with that last ethereal wail of the
swan that quivered and faded away into the sky.

It left John sitting so silent and rapt that he did not for some
time notice the usher tapping him lightly on the shoulder and
saying politely, "Will you step this way, please, sir?"  A
little surprised, he arose quickly at the last tap, and, turning
to leave his seat, looked full into the face of the fair-haired
young man.  For the first time the young man recognized his
dark boyhood playmate, and John knew that it was the Judge's
son.  The White John started, lifted his hand, and then froze
into his chair; the black John smiled lightly, then grimly, and
followed the usher down the aisle.  The manager was sorry,
very, very sorry,--but he explained that some mistake had
been made in selling the gentleman a seat already disposed
of; he would refund the money, of course,--and indeed felt
the matter keenly, and so forth, and--before he had finished
John was gone, walking hurriedly across the square and
down the broad streets, and as he passed the park he buttoned
his coat and said, "John Jones, you're a natural-born fool."
Then he went to his lodgings and wrote a letter, and tore it
up; he wrote another, and threw it in the fire.  Then he seized
a scrap of paper and wrote: "Dear Mother and Sister--I am
coming--John."

"Perhaps," said John, as he settled himself on the train,
"perhaps I am to blame myself in struggling against my
manifest destiny simply because it looks hard and unpleasant.
Here is my duty to Altamaha plain before me; perhaps they'll
let me help settle the Negro problems there,--perhaps they
won't.  'I will go in to the King, which is not according to the
law; and if I perish, I perish.'" And then he mused and
dreamed, and planned a life-work; and the train flew south.

Down in Altamaha, after seven long years, all the world
knew John was coming.  The homes were scrubbed and scoured,
--above all, one; the gardens and yards had an unwonted
trimness, and Jennie bought a new gingham.  With some
finesse and negotiation, all the dark Methodists and Presbyteri-
ans were induced to join in a monster welcome at the Baptist
Church; and as the day drew near, warm discussions arose on
every corner as to the exact extent and nature of John's
accomplishments.  It was noontide on a gray and cloudy day
when he came.  The black town flocked to the depot, with a
little of the white at the edges,--a happy throng, with "Good-
mawnings" and "Howdys" and laughing and joking and
jostling.  Mother sat yonder in the window watching; but
sister Jennie stood on the platform, nervously fingering her
dress, tall and lithe, with soft brown skin and loving eyes
peering from out a tangled wilderness of hair.  John rose
gloomily as the train stopped, for he was thinking of the "Jim
Crow" car; he stepped to the platform, and paused: a little
dingy station, a black crowd gaudy and dirty, a half-mile of
dilapidated shanties along a straggling ditch of mud.  An over-
whelming sense of the sordidness and narrowness of it all
seized him; he looked in vain for his mother, kissed coldly
the tall, strange girl who called him brother, spoke a short,
dry word here and there; then, lingering neither for hand-
shaking nor gossip, started silently up the street, raising his
hat merely to the last eager old aunty, to her open-mouthed
astonishment.  The people were distinctly bewildered.  This
silent, cold man,--was this John?  Where was his smile and
hearty hand-grasp?  "'Peared kind o' down in the mouf,"
said the Methodist preacher thoughtfully.  "Seemed monstus
stuck up," complained a Baptist sister.  But the white post-
master from the edge of the crowd expressed the opinion of
his folks plainly.  "That damn Nigger," said he, as he shoul-
dered the mail and arranged his tobacco, "has gone North
and got plum full o' fool notions; but they won't work in
Altamaha."  And the crowd melted away.

The meeting of welcome at the Baptist Church was a
failure.  Rain spoiled the barbecue, and thunder turned the
milk in the ice-cream.  When the speaking came at night, the
house was crowded to overflowing.  The three preachers had
especially prepared themselves, but somehow John's manner
seemed to throw a blanket over everything,--he seemed so
cold and preoccupied, and had so strange an air of restraint
that the Methodist brother could not warm up to his theme
and elicited not a single "Amen"; the Presbyterian prayer
was but feebly responded to, and even the Baptist preacher,
though he wakened faint enthusiasm, got so mixed up in his
favorite sentence that he had to close it by stopping fully
fifteen minutes sooner than he meant.  The people moved
uneasily in their seats as John rose to reply.  He spoke slowly
and methodically.  The age, he said, demanded new ideas; we
were far different from those men of the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries,--with broader ideas of human brother-
hood and destiny.  Then he spoke of the rise of charity and
popular education, and particularly of the spread of wealth
and work.  The question was, then, he added reflectively,
looking at the low discolored ceiling, what part the Negroes of
this land would take in the striving of the new century.  He
sketched in vague outline the new Industrial School that
might rise among these pines, he spoke in detail of the
charitable and philanthropic work that might be organized, of
money that might be saved for banks and business.  Finally he
urged unity, and deprecated especially religious and denomi-
national bickering.  "To-day," he said, with a smile, "the
world cares little whether a man be Baptist or Methodist, or
indeed a churchman at all, so long as he is good and true.
What difference does it make whether a man be baptized in
river or washbowl, or not at all?  Let's leave all that littleness,
and look higher."  Then, thinking of nothing else, he slowly
sat down.  A painful hush seized that crowded mass.  Little
had they understood of what he said, for he spoke an un-
known tongue, save the last word about baptism; that they
knew, and they sat very still while the clock ticked.  Then at
last a low suppressed snarl came from the Amen corner, and
an old bent man arose, walked over the seats, and climbed
straight up into the pulpit.  He was wrinkled and black, with
scant gray and tufted hair; his voice and hands shook as with
palsy; but on his face lay the intense rapt look of the religious
fanatic.  He seized the Bible with his rough, huge hands;
twice he raised it inarticulate, and then fairly burst into
words, with rude and awful eloquence.  He quivered, swayed,
and bent; then rose aloft in perfect majesty, till the people
moaned and wept, wailed and shouted, and a wild shrieking
arose from the corners where all the pent-up feeling of the
hour gathered itself and rushed into the air.  John never knew
clearly what the old man said; he only felt himself held up to
scorn and scathing denunciation for trampling on the true
Religion, and he realized with amazement that all unknow-
ingly he had put rough, rude hands on something this little
world held sacred.  He arose silently, and passed out into the
night.  Down toward the sea he went, in the fitful starlight,
half conscious of the girl who followed timidly after him.
When at last he stood upon the bluff, he turned to his little
sister and looked upon her sorrowfully, remembering with
sudden pain how little thought he had given her.  He put his
arm about her and let her passion of tears spend itself on his
shoulder.

Long they stood together, peering over the gray unresting
water.

"John," she said, "does it make every one--unhappy
when they study and learn lots of things?"

He paused and smiled.  "I am afraid it does," he said.

"And, John, are you glad you studied?"

"Yes," came the answer, slowly but positively.

She watched the flickering lights upon the sea, and said
thoughtfully, "I wish I was unhappy,--and--and," putting
both arms about his neck, "I think I am, a little, John."

It was several days later that John walked up to the Judge's
house to ask for the privilege of teaching the Negro school.
The Judge himself met him at the front door, stared a little
hard at him, and said brusquely, "Go 'round to the kitchen
door, John, and wait."  Sitting on the kitchen steps, John
stared at the corn, thoroughly perplexed.  What on earth had
come over him?  Every step he made offended some one.  He
had come to save his people, and before he left the depot he
had hurt them.  He sought to teach them at the church, and had
outraged their deepest feelings.  He had schooled himself
to be respectful to the Judge, and then blundered into his
front door.  And all the time he had meant right,--and yet,
and yet, somehow he found it so hard and strange to fit his
old surroundings again, to find his place in the world about
him.  He could not remember that he used to have any diffi-
culty in the past, when life was glad and gay.  The world
seemed smooth and easy then.  Perhaps,--but his sister came
to the kitchen door just then and said the Judge awaited him.

The Judge sat in the dining-room amid his morning's mail,
and he did not ask John to sit down.  He plunged squarely into
the business.  "You've come for the school, I suppose.  Well
John, I want to speak to you plainly.  You know I'm a friend
to your people.  I've helped you and your family, and would
have done more if you hadn't got the notion of going off.
Now I like the colored people, and sympathize with all their
reasonable aspirations; but you and I both know, John, that in
this country the Negro must remain subordinate, and can
never expect to be the equal of white men.  In their place,
your people can be honest and respectful; and God knows,
I'll do what I can to help them.  But when they want to
reverse nature, and rule white men, and marry white women,
and sit in my parlor, then, by God! we'll hold them under if
we have to lynch every Nigger in the land.  Now, John, the
question is, are you, with your education and Northern no-
tions, going to accept the situation and teach the darkies to be
faithful servants and laborers as your fathers were,--I knew
your father, John, he belonged to my brother, and he was a
good Nigger.  Well--well, are you going to be like him, or are
you going to try to put fool ideas of rising and equality into
these folks' heads, and make them discontented and unhappy?"

"I am going to accept the situation, Judge Henderson,"
answered John, with a brevity that did not escape the keen
old man.  He hesitated a moment, and then said shortly,
"Very well,--we'll try you awhile.  Good-morning."

It was a full month after the opening of the Negro school
that the other John came home, tall, gay, and headstrong.
The mother wept, the sisters sang.  The whole white town was
glad.  A proud man was the Judge, and it was a goodly sight
to see the two swinging down Main Street together.  And yet
all did not go smoothly between them, for the younger man
could not and did not veil his contempt for the little town,
and plainly had his heart set on New York.  Now the one
cherished ambition of the Judge was to see his son mayor of
Altamaha, representative to the legislature, and--who could
say?--governor of Georgia.  So the argument often waxed hot
between them.  "Good heavens, father," the younger man
would say after dinner, as he lighted a cigar and stood by the
fireplace, "you surely don't expect a young fellow like me to
settle down permanently in this--this God-forgotten town
with nothing but mud and Negroes?"  "I did," the Judge
would answer laconically; and on this particular day it seemed
from the gathering scowl that he was about to add something
more emphatic, but neighbors had already begun to drop in to
admire his son, and the conversation drifted.

"Heah that John is livenin' things up at the darky school,"
volunteered the postmaster, after a pause.

"What now?" asked the Judge, sharply.

"Oh, nothin' in particulah,--just his almighty air and up-
pish ways.  B'lieve I did heah somethin' about his givin' talks
on the French Revolution, equality, and such like.  He's what
I call a dangerous Nigger."

"Have you heard him say anything out of the way?"

"Why, no,--but Sally, our girl, told my wife a lot of rot.
Then, too, I don't need to heah: a Nigger what won't say 'sir'
to a white man, or--"

"Who is this John?" interrupted the son.

"Why, it's little black John, Peggy's son,--your old
playfellow."

The young man's face flushed angrily, and then he laughed.

"Oh," said he, "it's the darky that tried to force himself
into a seat beside the lady I was escorting--"

But Judge Henderson waited to hear no more.  He had been
nettled all day, and now at this he rose with a half-smothered
oath, took his hat and cane, and walked straight to the
schoolhouse.

For John, it had been a long, hard pull to get things started
in the rickety old shanty that sheltered his school.  The Ne-
groes were rent into factions for and against him, the parents
were careless, the children irregular and dirty, and books,
pencils, and slates largely missing.  Nevertheless, he struggled
hopefully on, and seemed to see at last some glimmering of
dawn.  The attendance was larger and the children were a
shade cleaner this week.  Even the booby class in reading
showed a little comforting progress.  So John settled himself
with renewed patience this afternoon.

"Now, Mandy," he said cheerfully, "that's better; but you
mustn't chop your words up so: 'If--the-man--goes.' Why,
your little brother even wouldn't tell a story that way, now
would he?"

"Naw, suh, he cain't talk."

"All right; now let's try again: 'If the man--'

"John!"

The whole school started in surprise, and the teacher half
arose, as the red, angry face of the Judge appeared in the
open doorway.

"John, this school is closed.  You children can go home
and get to work.  The white people of Altamaha are not
spending their money on black folks to have their heads
crammed with impudence and lies.  Clear out!  I'll lock the
door myself."

Up at the great pillared house the tall young son wandered
aimlessly about after his father's abrupt departure.  In the
house there was little to interest him; the books were old and
stale, the local newspaper flat, and the women had retired
with headaches and sewing.  He tried a nap, but it was too
warm.  So he sauntered out into the fields, complaining dis-
consolately, "Good Lord! how long will this imprisonment
last!"  He was not a bad fellow,--just a little spoiled and
self-indulgent, and as headstrong as his proud father.  He
seemed a young man pleasant to look upon, as he sat on the
great black stump at the edge of the pines idly swinging his
legs and smoking.  "Why, there isn't even a girl worth getting
up a respectable flirtation with," he growled.  Just then his
eye caught a tall, willowy figure hurrying toward him on the
narrow path.  He looked with interest at first, and then burst
into a laugh as he said, "Well, I declare, if it isn't Jennie, the
little brown kitchen-maid!  Why, I never noticed before what
a trim little body she is.  Hello, Jennie!  Why, you haven't
kissed me since I came home," he said gaily.  The young girl
stared at him in surprise and confusion,--faltered something
inarticulate, and attempted to pass.  But a wilful mood had
seized the young idler, and he caught at her arm.  Frightened,
she slipped by; and half mischievously he turned and ran after
her through the tall pines.

Yonder, toward the sea, at the end of the path, came John
slowly, with his head down.  He had turned wearily homeward
from the schoolhouse; then, thinking to shield his mother
from the blow, started to meet his sister as she came from
work and break the news of his dismissal to her.  "I'll go
away," he said slowly; "I'll go away and find work, and
send for them.  I cannot live here longer."  And then the fierce,
buried anger surged up into his throat.  He waved his arms and
hurried wildly up the path.

The great brown sea lay silent.  The air scarce breathed.
The dying day bathed the twisted oaks and mighty pines in
black and gold.  There came from the wind no warning, not a
whisper from the cloudless sky.  There was only a black man
hurrying on with an ache in his heart, seeing neither sun nor
sea, but starting as from a dream at the frightened cry that
woke the pines, to see his dark sister struggling in the arms of
a tall and fair-haired man.

He said not a word, but, seizing a fallen limb, struck him
with all the pent-up hatred of his great black arm, and the
body lay white and still beneath the pines, all bathed in
sunshine and in blood.  John looked at it dreamily, then walked
back to the house briskly, and said in a soft voice, "Mammy,
I'm going away--I'm going to be free."

She gazed at him dimly and faltered, "No'th, honey, is yo'
gwine No'th agin?"

He looked out where the North Star glistened pale above
the waters, and said, "Yes, mammy, I'm going--North."

Then, without another word, he went out into the narrow
lane, up by the straight pines, to the same winding path, and
seated himself on the great black stump, looking at the blood
where the body had lain.  Yonder in the gray past he had
played with that dead boy, romping together under the sol-
emn trees.  The night deepened; he thought of the boys at
Johnstown.  He wondered how Brown had turned out, and
Carey?  And Jones,--Jones?  Why, he was Jones, and he
wondered what they would all say when they knew, when
they knew, in that great long dining-room with its hundreds
of merry eyes.  Then as the sheen of the starlight stole over
him, he thought of the gilded ceiling of that vast concert hall,
heard stealing toward him the faint sweet music of the swan.
Hark! was it music, or the hurry and shouting of men?  Yes,
surely!  Clear and high the faint sweet melody rose and fluttered
like a living thing, so that the very earth trembled as with the
tramp of horses and murmur of angry men.

He leaned back and smiled toward the sea, whence rose the
strange melody, away from the dark shadows where lay the
noise of horses galloping, galloping on.  With an effort he
roused himself, bent forward, and looked steadily down the
pathway, softly humming the "Song of the Bride,"--

"Freudig gefuhrt, ziehet dahin."

Amid the trees in the dim morning twilight he watched their
shadows dancing and heard their horses thundering toward
him, until at last they came sweeping like a storm, and he
saw in front that haggard white-haired man, whose eyes
flashed red with fury.  Oh, how he pitied him,--pitied him,
--and wondered if he had the coiling twisted rope.  Then, as
the storm burst round him, he rose slowly to his feet and
turned his closed eyes toward the Sea.

And the world whistled in his ears.






XIV

Of the Sorrow Songs

I walk through the churchyard
    To lay this body down;
I know moon-rise, I know star-rise;
I walk in the moonlight, I walk in the starlight;
I'll lie in the grave and stretch out my arms,
I'll go to judgment in the evening of the day,
And my soul and thy soul shall meet that day,
    When I lay this body down.

NEGRO SONG.


They that walked in darkness sang songs in the olden days--
Sorrow Songs--for they were weary at heart.  And so before
each thought that I have written in this book I have set a
phrase, a haunting echo of these weird old songs in which the
soul of the black slave spoke to men.  Ever since I was a child
these songs have stirred me strangely.  They came out of the
South unknown to me, one by one, and yet at once I knew
them as of me and of mine.  Then in after years when I came
to Nashville I saw the great temple builded of these songs
towering over the pale city.  To me Jubilee Hall seemed ever
made of the songs themselves, and its bricks were red with
the blood and dust of toil.  Out of them rose for me morning,
noon, and night, bursts of wonderful melody, full of the
voices of my brothers and sisters, full of the voices of the
past.

Little of beauty has America given the world save the rude
grandeur God himself stamped on her bosom; the human
spirit in this new world has expressed itself in vigor and
ingenuity rather than in beauty.  And so by fateful chance
the Negro folk-song--the rhythmic cry of the slave--stands
to-day not simply as the sole American music, but as the
most beautiful expression of human experience born this side
the seas.  It has been neglected, it has been, and is, half
despised, and above all it has been persistently mistaken and
misunderstood; but notwithstanding, it still remains as the
singular spiritual heritage of the nation and the greatest gift of
the Negro people.

Away back in the thirties the melody of these slave songs
stirred the nation, but the songs were soon half forgotten.
Some, like "Near the lake where drooped the willow," passed
into current airs and their source was forgotten; others were
caricatured on the "minstrel" stage and their memory died
away.  Then in war-time came the singular Port Royal experi-
ment after the capture of Hilton Head, and perhaps for the
first time the North met the Southern slave face to face and
heart to heart with no third witness.  The Sea Islands of the
Carolinas, where they met, were filled with a black folk of
primitive type, touched and moulded less by the world about
them than any others outside the Black Belt.  Their appear-
ance was uncouth, their language funny, but their hearts were
human and their singing stirred men with a mighty power.
Thomas Wentworth Higginson hastened to tell of these songs,
and Miss McKim and others urged upon the world their rare
beauty.  But the world listened only half credulously until the
Fisk Jubilee Singers sang the slave songs so deeply into the
world's heart that it can never wholly forget them again.

There was once a blacksmith's son born at Cadiz, New
York, who in the changes of time taught school in Ohio and
helped defend Cincinnati from Kirby Smith.  Then he fought at
Chancellorsville and Gettysburg and finally served in the
Freedmen's Bureau at Nashville.  Here he formed a Sunday-
school class of black children in 1866, and sang with them
and taught them to sing.  And then they taught him to sing, and
when once the glory of the Jubilee songs passed into the soul
of George L. White, he knew his life-work was to let those
Negroes sing to the world as they had sung to him.  So in
1871 the pilgrimage of the Fisk Jubilee Singers began.  North
to Cincinnati they rode,--four half-clothed black boys and
five girl-women,--led by a man with a cause and a purpose.
They stopped at Wilberforce, the oldest of Negro schools,
where a black bishop blessed them.  Then they went, fighting
cold and starvation, shut out of hotels, and cheerfully sneered
at, ever northward; and ever the magic of their song kept
thrilling hearts, until a burst of applause in the Congrega-
tional Council at Oberlin revealed them to the world.  They
came to New York and Henry Ward Beecher dared to wel-
come them, even though the metropolitan dailies sneered at
his "Nigger Minstrels."  So their songs conquered till they
sang across the land and across the sea, before Queen and
Kaiser, in Scotland and Ireland, Holland and Switzerland.
Seven years they sang, and brought back a hundred and fifty
thousand dollars to found Fisk University.

Since their day they have been imitated--sometimes well,
by the singers of Hampton and Atlanta, sometimes ill, by
straggling quartettes.  Caricature has sought again to spoil the
quaint beauty of the music, and has filled the air with many
debased melodies which vulgar ears scarce know from the
real.  But the true Negro folk-song still lives in the hearts of
those who have heard them truly sung and in the hearts of the
Negro people.

What are these songs, and what do they mean?  I know
little of music and can say nothing in technical phrase, but I
know something of men, and knowing them, I know that
these songs are the articulate message of the slave to the world.
They tell us in these eager days that life was joyous to the
black slave, careless and happy.  I can easily believe this of
some, of many.  But not all the past South, though it rose from
the dead, can gainsay the heart-touching witness of these
songs.  They are the music of an unhappy people, of the
children of disappointment; they tell of death and suffering
and unvoiced longing toward a truer world, of misty wander-
ings and hidden ways.

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

Do ba-na co-ba, ge-ne me, ge-ne me!
Do ba-na co-ba, ge-ne me, ge-ne me!
Ben d' nu-li, nu-li, nu-li, ben d' le.


The child sang it to his children and they to their children's
children, and so two hundred years it has travelled down to us
and we sing it to our children, knowing as little as our fathers
what its words may mean, but knowing well the meaning of
its music.

This was primitive African music; it may be seen in larger
form in the strange chant which heralds "The Coming of John":


  "You may bury me in the East,
   You may bury me in the West,
   But I'll hear the trumpet sound in that morning,"

--the voice of exile.

Ten master songs, more or less, one may pluck from the
forest of melody-songs of undoubted Negro origin and wide
popular currency, and songs peculiarly characteristic of the
slave.  One of these I have just mentioned.  Another whose
strains begin this book is "Nobody knows the trouble I've
seen."  When, struck with a sudden poverty, the United
States refused to fulfill its promises of land to the freedmen, a
brigadier-general went down to the Sea Islands to carry the
news.  An old woman on the outskirts of the throng began
singing this song; all the mass joined with her, swaying.  And
the soldier wept.

The third song is the cradle-song of death which all men
know,-"Swing low, sweet chariot,"--whose bars begin the
life story of "Alexander Crummell."  Then there is the song
of many waters, "Roll, Jordan, roll," a mighty chorus with
minor cadences.  There were many songs of the fugitive like
that which opens "The Wings of Atalanta," and the more
familiar "Been a-listening."  The seventh is the song of the End
and the Beginning--"My Lord, what a mourning! when the
stars begin to fall"; a strain of this is placed before "The
Dawn of Freedom."  The song of groping--"My way's
cloudy"--begins "The Meaning of Progress"; the ninth is
the song of this chapter--"Wrestlin' Jacob, the day is
a-breaking,"--a paean of hopeful strife.  The last master song
is the song of songs--"Steal away,"--sprung from "The
Faith of the Fathers."

There are many others of the Negro folk-songs as striking
and characteristic as these, as, for instance, the three strains
in the third, eighth, and ninth chapters; and others I am sure
could easily make a selection on more scientific principles.
There are, too, songs that seem to be a step removed from the
more primitive types: there is the maze-like medley, "Bright
sparkles," one phrase of which heads "The Black Belt"; the
Easter carol, "Dust, dust and ashes"; the dirge, "My moth-
er's took her flight and gone home"; and that burst of melody
hovering over "The Passing of the First-Born"--"I hope my
mother will be there in that beautiful world on high."

These represent a third step in the development of the slave
song, of which "You may bury me in the East" is the first,
and songs like "March on" (chapter six) and "Steal away"
are the second.  The first is African music, the second Afro-
American, while the third is a blending of Negro music with
the music heard in the foster land.  The result is still distinc-
tively Negro and the method of blending original, but the
elements are both Negro and Caucasian.  One might go further
and find a fourth step in this development, where the songs of
white America have been distinctively influenced by the slave
songs or have incorporated whole phrases of Negro melody,
as "Swanee River" and "Old Black Joe."  Side by side, too,
with the growth has gone the debasements and imitations--
the Negro "minstrel" songs, many of the "gospel" hymns,
and some of the contemporary "coon" songs,--a mass of
music in which the novice may easily lose himself and never
find the real Negro melodies.

In these songs, I have said, the slave spoke to the world.
Such a message is naturally veiled and half articulate.  Words
and music have lost each other and new and cant phrases of a
dimly understood theology have displaced the older senti-
ment.  Once in a while we catch a strange word of an un-
known tongue, as the "Mighty Myo," which figures as a
river of death; more often slight words or mere doggerel are
joined to music of singular sweetness.  Purely secular songs are
few in number, partly because many of them were turned into
hymns by a change of words, partly because the frolics were
seldom heard by the stranger, and the music less often caught.
Of nearly all the songs, however, the music is distinctly
sorrowful.  The ten master songs I have mentioned tell in
word and music of trouble and exile, of strife and hiding;
they grope toward some unseen power and sigh for rest in the
End.

The words that are left to us are not without interest, and,
cleared of evident dross, they conceal much of real poetry
and meaning beneath conventional theology and unmeaning
rhapsody.  Like all primitive folk, the slave stood near to
Nature's heart.  Life was a "rough and rolling sea" like the
brown Atlantic of the Sea Islands; the "Wilderness" was the
home of God, and the "lonesome valley" led to the way of
life.  "Winter'll soon be over," was the picture of life and
death to a tropical imagination.  The sudden wild thunder-
storms of the South awed and impressed the Negroes,--at
times the rumbling seemed to them "mournful," at times
imperious:


  "My Lord calls me,
  He calls me by the thunder,
  The trumpet sounds it in my soul."


The monotonous toil and exposure is painted in many words.
One sees the ploughmen in the hot, moist furrow, singing:

  "Dere's no rain to wet you,
   Dere's no sun to burn you,
   Oh, push along, believer,
   I want to go home."


The bowed and bent old man cries, with thrice-repeated wail:

  "O Lord, keep me from sinking down,"

and he rebukes the devil of doubt who can whisper:

  "Jesus is dead and God's gone away."

Yet the soul-hunger is there, the restlessness of the savage,
the wail of the wanderer, and the plaint is put in one little phrase:

My soul wants something that's new, that's new


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


  "Yonder's my ole mudder,
   Been waggin' at de hill so long;
  'Bout time she cross over,
   Git home bime-by."

Elsewhere comes the cry of the "motherless" and the "Farewell,
farewell, my only child."

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

Poor Ro-sy, poor gal; Poor Ro-sy,
poor gal; Ro-sy break my poor heart,
Heav'n shall-a-be my home.

A black woman said of the song, "It can't be sung without a
full heart and a troubled sperrit."  The same voice sings here
that sings in the German folk-song:


    "Jetz Geh i' an's brunele, trink' aber net."


Of death the Negro showed little fear, but talked of it
familiarly and even fondly as simply a crossing of the waters,
perhaps--who knows?--back to his ancient forests again.  Later
days transfigured his fatalism, and amid the dust and dirt the
toiler sang:


   "Dust, dust and ashes, fly over my grave,

    But the Lord shall bear my spirit home."


The things evidently borrowed from the surrounding world
undergo characteristic change when they enter the mouth of
the slave.  Especially is this true of Bible phrases.  "Weep, O
captive daughter of Zion," is quaintly turned into "Zion,
weep-a-low," and the wheels of Ezekiel are turned every way
in the mystic dreaming of the slave, till he says:


 "There's a little wheel a-turnin' in-a-my heart."


As in olden time, the words of these hymns were impro-
vised by some leading minstrel of the religious band.  The
circumstances of the gathering, however, the rhythm of the
songs, and the limitations of allowable thought, confined the
poetry for the most part to single or double lines, and they
seldom were expanded to quatrains or longer tales, although
there are some few examples of sustained efforts, chiefly
paraphrases of the Bible.  Three short series of verses have
always attracted me,--the one that heads this chapter, of one
line of which Thomas Wentworth Higginson has fittingly
said, "Never, it seems to me, since man first lived and
suffered was his infinite longing for peace uttered more plain-
tively."  The second and third are descriptions of the Last
Judgment,--the one a late improvisation, with some traces
of outside influence:


  "Oh, the stars in the elements are falling,

   And the moon drips away into blood,

   And the ransomed of the Lord are returning unto God,

   Blessed be the name of the Lord."

And the other earlier and homelier picture from the low
coast lands:


  "Michael, haul the boat ashore,
   Then you'll hear the horn they blow,
   Then you'll hear the trumpet sound,
   Trumpet sound the world around,
   Trumpet sound for rich and poor,
   Trumpet sound the Jubilee,
   Trumpet sound for you and me."


Through all the sorrow of the Sorrow Songs there breathes
a hope--a faith in the ultimate justice of things.  The minor
cadences of despair change often to triumph and calm confi-
dence.  Sometimes it is faith in life, sometimes a faith in
death, sometimes assurance of boundless justice in some fair
world beyond.  But whichever it is, the meaning is always
clear: that sometime, somewhere, men will judge men by
their souls and not by their skins.  Is such a hope justified?  Do
the Sorrow Songs sing true?

The silently growing assumption of this age is that the
probation of races is past, and that the backward races of
to-day are of proven inefficiency and not worth the saving.
Such an assumption is the arrogance of peoples irreverent
toward Time and ignorant of the deeds of men.  A thousand
years ago such an assumption, easily possible, would have
made it difficult for the Teuton to prove his right to life.  Two
thousand years ago such dogmatism, readily welcome, would
have scouted the idea of blond races ever leading civilization.
So wofully unorganized is sociological knowledge that the
meaning of progress, the meaning of "swift" and "slow" in
human doing, and the limits of human perfectability, are
veiled, unanswered sphinxes on the shores of science.  Why
should AEschylus have sung two thousand years before Shake-
speare was born?  Why has civilization flourished in Europe,
and flickered, flamed, and died in Africa?  So long as the
world stands meekly dumb before such questions, shall this
nation proclaim its ignorance and unhallowed prejudices by
denying freedom of opportunity to those who brought the
Sorrow Songs to the Seats of the Mighty?

Your country?  How came it yours?  Before the Pilgrims
landed we were here.  Here we have brought our three gifts
and mingled them with yours: a gift of story and song--soft,
stirring melody in an ill-harmonized and unmelodious land; the
gift of sweat and brawn to beat back the wilderness, conquer
the soil, and lay the foundations of this vast economic empire
two hundred years earlier than your weak hands could have
done it; the third, a gift of the Spirit.  Around us the history of
the land has centred for thrice a hundred years; out of the
nation's heart we have called all that was best to throttle and
subdue all that was worst; fire and blood, prayer and sacri-
fice, have billowed over this people, and they have found
peace only in the altars of the God of Right.  Nor has our gift
of the Spirit been merely passive.  Actively we have woven
ourselves with the very warp and woof of this nation,--we
fought their battles, shared their sorrow, mingled our blood
with theirs, and generation after generation have pleaded with
a headstrong, careless people to despise not Justice, Mercy,
and Truth, lest the nation be smitten with a curse.  Our song,
our toil, our cheer, and warning have been given to this
nation in blood-brotherhood.  Are not these gifts worth the
giving?  Is not this work and striving?  Would America have
been America without her Negro people?

Even so is the hope that sang in the songs of my fathers
well sung.  If somewhere in this whirl and chaos of things
there dwells Eternal Good, pitiful yet masterful, then anon in
His good time America shall rend the Veil and the prisoned
shall go free.  Free, free as the sunshine trickling down the
morning into these high windows of mine, free as yonder
fresh young voices welling up to me from the caverns of
brick and mortar below--swelling with song, instinct with
life, tremulous treble and darkening bass.  My children, my
little children, are singing to the sunshine, and thus they sing:

Let us cheer the wea-ry trav-el-ler,
Cheer the wea-ry trav-el-ler, Let us
cheer the wea-ry trav-el-ler  A-
-long the heav-en-ly way.

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





The Afterthought


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

THE END