Echoes from Africa.
“THE fate of the Nagro,” it has been said “is the romance of our age.” The events which have transpired in his history, since the great emancipation in the United States, and which are now transpiring, are in the highest degree romantic. There will always gather around the history of the race a pathetic interest, which must kindle the imagination, touch the heart, and awaken the sympathies of all in whom there is a spark of humanity.
The intelligence we have just received from America of largo migrations of Negroes from the Southern to the Western States is full of melancholy and suggestive interest. To reflecting minds acquainted with the history of Southern society during the last fifty years these events are not surprising. Retributive justice may linger, but it is sure. A prosperity built up on the wrongs of a race by the unrequited labour of a whole people, ought not to have been expected to be permanent. In 1858, the chivalry of Louisiana passed a law forbidding free blacks to come in; now they would pass a law forbidding them to go out.
Many years ago, we are informed by a writer of Southern birth, an artist of Philadelphia was engaged by the State of South Carolina to paint some national emblematic picture for her State House. Jefferson Davis was requested to act with the South Carolina Committee at Washington in criticising the studies for this work. The most creditable sketch presented was a design representing the North by various mechanical implements; the West by a prairie and plough; while the South was represented by various things, the centre-piece, however, being a cotton-bale with a Negro upon it fast asleep. When Mr. Davis saw it, he said, “Gentlemen, this will never do; what will become of the South when the Negro wakes up?”
The discussions which the reconstruction laws have made possible in the South, the circulation of newspapers, the education of Negro youth as preachers and teachers, have roused the Negro, and startled him to his feet. The thunders of the Civil War awoke him from his profound slumber; but he lay on the cotton-bale with his eyes open, uncertain where he was. The man who has been suddenly roused from a long sleep takes some time to recover himself. The Negro is now up—stupid, perhaps, as yet, from a protracted and undisturbed slumber, but he is up, and wants to adjust his relations to the cotton-bale upon an equitable footing, or leave the bale and its owner to their fate. Hence the exodus and migration idea, which menaces the South in every department of its organic life. And this is a specially inopportune moment for the carrying out of such an idea on anything like a large scale. The prosperity of the South has been rapidly returning under free labour, and was being placed on a satisfactory and enduring basis. Mr. Jefferson Davis lately declared that the ex-slaveholders were so far satisfied with the change that they would not, if they could, revert to the former system. And yet the owners of these reviving estates have been so unwise and reckless as to adopt such a system of treatment as has spread dissatisfaction among their hands. And, from all we can gather, this harsh and oppressive treatment has not been of a hap-hazard or isolated character, but the result of a deep-laid scheme. The plan seems to have been so to impoverish their labourers as to make them helplessly dependent, to check by a tyrannical repression the normal impulse of advance, to arrest the people through their elementary needs at a capriciously-chosen point in their progress, and fix them in it, and thus bring about a species of serfdom very little better than the former bondage.
The Rev. Joseph Cook, the celebrated Boston lecturer, in an address before the American Association, furnishes the following information:--
Last summer, on Lake Chautauqua, while I had a little leisure, I fell into conversation with one of the acutest members of Washington society—I dare not describe him more definitely—and he said to me: “The Negro is getting in debt. He is a peasant; he rents land; he has only very small wages; he buys his groceries at a store owned by his landlord, and runs up a bill there; and the silent scheme of the South is to get the Negro into debt. Then he cannot very well leave town until his debts are paid. He becomes a fixture, in many cases, because of his indebtedness; and, to make the story short, sir,” said my informant, “some of us fear that fifty years hence a considerable portion of the freedmen will be in a state of peonage. They will be bankrupt tenants under the power of landlords. And it is often whispered in the South that this will be the next best thing to the restoration of slavery.” [1]
No people having their eyes open and standing on their feet would long submit to such a state of things. But the intelligent among the Negro population do not seem to consider that any migration in the United States will materially affect for the better the social and political status of the coloured people.
The People’s Advocate (Feb. 1, 1879), a coloured paper published at Washington, in an able editorial on the subject, says:--
There has been a very respectable partial migration, and no perceptible change has come over the South in its ideas of Negro citizenship. In 1869-70, 60,000 left Virginia and North Corolina for Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Arkansas. They left Georgia by the thousands for Arkansas, Mississippi, and Louisiana, and have gone from Eastern Virginia to New York and New England; but the feeling is nearly as bad to-day in Virginia and Georgia as it was years ago.
And they are now fleeing from Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana.
Tis but a poor relief they gain Who change the place but keep the pain.
And it strikes us, viewing matters from this distant standpoint, that the feeling toward the Negro will continue to be “bad” in the United States, if being “bad” means the non-recognition of his social and political equality with the white man. For the Negro, pure and simple, there is no country but Africa, and in America his deeper instincts tell him so. He will never be understood, nor will he ever understand his European guide and teacher, as long as he remains in the countries of his exile. He is often misled by the overflowing and ceaseless generosity of white men into a belief that his benefactors are getting nearer to the idea of practical oneness and brotherhood with him. But among the phenomena in the relations of the white man to the Negro in the house of bondage none has been more curious than this: that the white man, under a keen sense of the wrongs done to the Negro, will work for him, will suffer for him, will fight for him, will even die for him, but he cannot get rid of a secret contempt for him.
The intelligence we have just received from America of largo migrations of Negroes from the Southern to the Western States is full of melancholy and suggestive interest. To reflecting minds acquainted with the history of Southern society during the last fifty years these events are not surprising. Retributive justice may linger, but it is sure. A prosperity built up on the wrongs of a race by the unrequited labour of a whole people, ought not to have been expected to be permanent. In 1858, the chivalry of Louisiana passed a law forbidding free blacks to come in; now they would pass a law forbidding them to go out.
Many years ago, we are informed by a writer of Southern birth, an artist of Philadelphia was engaged by the State of South Carolina to paint some national emblematic picture for her State House. Jefferson Davis was requested to act with the South Carolina Committee at Washington in criticising the studies for this work. The most creditable sketch presented was a design representing the North by various mechanical implements; the West by a prairie and plough; while the South was represented by various things, the centre-piece, however, being a cotton-bale with a Negro upon it fast asleep. When Mr. Davis saw it, he said, “Gentlemen, this will never do; what will become of the South when the Negro wakes up?”
The discussions which the reconstruction laws have made possible in the South, the circulation of newspapers, the education of Negro youth as preachers and teachers, have roused the Negro, and startled him to his feet. The thunders of the Civil War awoke him from his profound slumber; but he lay on the cotton-bale with his eyes open, uncertain where he was. The man who has been suddenly roused from a long sleep takes some time to recover himself. The Negro is now up—stupid, perhaps, as yet, from a protracted and undisturbed slumber, but he is up, and wants to adjust his relations to the cotton-bale upon an equitable footing, or leave the bale and its owner to their fate. Hence the exodus and migration idea, which menaces the South in every department of its organic life. And this is a specially inopportune moment for the carrying out of such an idea on anything like a large scale. The prosperity of the South has been rapidly returning under free labour, and was being placed on a satisfactory and enduring basis. Mr. Jefferson Davis lately declared that the ex-slaveholders were so far satisfied with the change that they would not, if they could, revert to the former system. And yet the owners of these reviving estates have been so unwise and reckless as to adopt such a system of treatment as has spread dissatisfaction among their hands. And, from all we can gather, this harsh and oppressive treatment has not been of a hap-hazard or isolated character, but the result of a deep-laid scheme. The plan seems to have been so to impoverish their labourers as to make them helplessly dependent, to check by a tyrannical repression the normal impulse of advance, to arrest the people through their elementary needs at a capriciously-chosen point in their progress, and fix them in it, and thus bring about a species of serfdom very little better than the former bondage.
The Rev. Joseph Cook, the celebrated Boston lecturer, in an address before the American Association, furnishes the following information:--
Last summer, on Lake Chautauqua, while I had a little leisure, I fell into conversation with one of the acutest members of Washington society—I dare not describe him more definitely—and he said to me: “The Negro is getting in debt. He is a peasant; he rents land; he has only very small wages; he buys his groceries at a store owned by his landlord, and runs up a bill there; and the silent scheme of the South is to get the Negro into debt. Then he cannot very well leave town until his debts are paid. He becomes a fixture, in many cases, because of his indebtedness; and, to make the story short, sir,” said my informant, “some of us fear that fifty years hence a considerable portion of the freedmen will be in a state of peonage. They will be bankrupt tenants under the power of landlords. And it is often whispered in the South that this will be the next best thing to the restoration of slavery.” [1]
No people having their eyes open and standing on their feet would long submit to such a state of things. But the intelligent among the Negro population do not seem to consider that any migration in the United States will materially affect for the better the social and political status of the coloured people.
The People’s Advocate (Feb. 1, 1879), a coloured paper published at Washington, in an able editorial on the subject, says:--
There has been a very respectable partial migration, and no perceptible change has come over the South in its ideas of Negro citizenship. In 1869-70, 60,000 left Virginia and North Corolina for Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Arkansas. They left Georgia by the thousands for Arkansas, Mississippi, and Louisiana, and have gone from Eastern Virginia to New York and New England; but the feeling is nearly as bad to-day in Virginia and Georgia as it was years ago.
And they are now fleeing from Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana.
Tis but a poor relief they gain Who change the place but keep the pain.
And it strikes us, viewing matters from this distant standpoint, that the feeling toward the Negro will continue to be “bad” in the United States, if being “bad” means the non-recognition of his social and political equality with the white man. For the Negro, pure and simple, there is no country but Africa, and in America his deeper instincts tell him so. He will never be understood, nor will he ever understand his European guide and teacher, as long as he remains in the countries of his exile. He is often misled by the overflowing and ceaseless generosity of white men into a belief that his benefactors are getting nearer to the idea of practical oneness and brotherhood with him. But among the phenomena in the relations of the white man to the Negro in the house of bondage none has been more curious than this: that the white man, under a keen sense of the wrongs done to the Negro, will work for him, will suffer for him, will fight for him, will even die for him, but he cannot get rid of a secret contempt for him.
Footnotes:
1 ‘The Three Despised Races,’ &c., p. 25.
1 ‘The Three Despised Races,’ &c., p. 25.
Mr. James Parton, in his article on ‘Antipathy to the Negro,’[2] says:--
When Miss, Kemble came first to Boston, in 1832, she sat next to the late John Quincy Adams at dinner one day, and the conversation turned upon the tragedy of “Othello,” Miss Kemble has since reported one of Mr, Adams’ remarks on this subject:—“Talking to me about Desdemona, ho assured me, with a most serious expression of sincere disgust, that he considered all her misfortunes as a very just judgment upon her for having married a nigger.” If this anecdote had not come to us on such respectable authority, we could hardly believe it of a man who, during the last and best ten years of his life, was looked upon as the black man’s champion,
Theodore Parker, who, in pleading for the slave, could “stir his hearers to the bottom of their hearts and soften them to tears;” who, in his famous letter to Millard Fillmore (Nov. 21, 1850), could say:--
I would rather lie all my life in jail and starve there, than refuse to protect one of these parishioners of mine. . . . . William Graft and Ellen were parishioners of mine. They have been at my house. I married them a fortnight ago this day. After the ceremony I put a Bible and then a sword into William’s hands, and told him the use of each. . . . . There hang beside me in my library, as I write, the gun my grandfather fought with at the battle of Lexington—he was a captain on that occasion—and also the musket he captured from a British soldier on that day, the first taken in the war for independence. If I would not peril my property, my liberty, my life, to keep my parishioners out of slavery, then I would throw away these trophies, and should think I was the son of some coward, and not a brave man’s child.[3]
Theodore Parker, who could say, “I should like of all things to see an insurrection of slaves;”[4] who could pronouce that pathetic and touching but terrible discourse over the great Webster; this same Theodore Parker did not think it inconsistent with his high ideal of human liberty and equal rights to write in a private letter as follows:--
Last night I could not coax the thermometer down below 79 degrees any way we could fix it. Now, at eight and a half a.m., I dare not look at it, it is so high. In the midst of the heat, there just came a monstrous African black! O dear, how black he was! Fat! bless me, he looked like a barrel (no, a sugar hogshead) of tar, so black, so fat! What an aggravation, with the thermometer at 90 degrees in the shade![5]
We should have taken this for the irrepressible overflow of harmless witticism but for other disparaging references to the Negro. To Miss Hunt he writes, under date November 10, 1857:--
There are inferior races which have always borne the same ignoble relation to the rest of men, and always will. For two generations what a change there will be in the condition and character of the Irish in New England I But, in twenty generations, the Negroes will stand just where they are now; that is, if they have not disappeared. In Massachusetts there are no laws now to keep the black man from any pursuit, any office, that he will; but there has never been a rich Negro in New England; not a man with ten thousand dollars, perhaps none with five thousand dollars; none eminent in anything except the calling of a waiter.[6]
Again: “In respect to the power of civilisation, the African is at the bottom, the American Indian next.”[7] Again: “When slavery is abolished, the African population will decline in the United States, and die out of the South as out of Northampton and Lexington.”[8]
Mr. Parker, after all he said and did for freedom, seems to have had an invincible contempt for weak and oppressed races. He waged uncompromising warfare against the process by which such peoples are degraded, but had no charity toward those suffering from the results of such process. He fought againt the parent, and ridiculed the offspring. The abstract to him was hateful; the concrete examples contemptible or ludicrous. He scorned the Irish and laughed at the Negro. He speaks of the Irish as follows:--
I don’t know but these Paddies are worse than the Africans to the country. We made a great mistake in attracting them here and allowing them to vote under loss than twenty-one years of quarantine. Certainly it would take all that time to clean a Paddy—on the outside, I mean; to clean him inwardly would be like picking up all the sands of the Sahara. There would be nothing left when the sands were gone.[9]
It is a pity that in speaking of the “gintleman from Car-r-r-k,” as in caricature he describes the Irishman, and of “the poor wretches from Africa,” he did not conform to his own canon of criticism. Speaking of Pierpont, he says: “Just now, considering all that he has done and suffered, it would seem a little ungenerous to be quite just. All pictures must be painted in reference to the light they are to hang in and be looked at.”[10]
Mr. Parker knew the “light” of prejudice and contempt in which his picture of the Negro was to “hang,” and yet, making no allowance for circumstances, and uninfluenced by the laws of moderation, he holds the balance between light and shade with an indifferent hand, paints in the gloomiest possible colours, and thus encourages rather than disarms the falsifying faculty of the observer, predisposed to an unfavourable impression.
Would Mr. Parker have joined Dennis Kearney, and raised a crusade in favour of the inhospitable legislation proposed by the opponents of Chinese immigration? In view of the splendid results in the United States, and in the world generally, of the manly struggle which Mr. Parker maintained for truth and freedom—in view of the large sacrifices which he unquestionably made in the cause of free humanity—many errors of temper and judgment on his part may be forgotten; but the Negro can never forget the slurs upon his race, of which, however, no one, perhaps, more readily than Mr. Parker would now admit the impolicy, if not the injustice. For how do such utterances differ in character and effects from those of the Notts and Gliddons, of the Calhouns and Jeff. Davises? And the fact—which should be suggestive to thinking Negroes in the United States—that they are reproduced in the Biography by Mr. Frothingham, shows that there is a feeling that they are the proper thing to say, even now, about the Negro. Can Congressional legislation remedy the evils produced by such caricatures and misrepresentations? Congress may decree civil rights to the “despised” race in America, and the exigencies of party may occasionally bring the Negro to the front; but what progress can he make when a public sentiment against him is fostered in the writings and in the private intercourse of his friends? In the language of the Liberian Declaration of Eights, “Public sentiment, more powerful than law, will never frown him down.”
The Negro, pure and simple, may rely upon it that, for him, the most enthusiastic of his benefactors sees nothing but the lowest occupations. In the case of the most liberal of his advocates, he will have occasionally to exclaim, Et tu, Brute!
A writer in the Methodist Quarterly Review for January, 1875, on ‘The Negro,’ has the following among the closing sentences of an able and plausible defence of the race:--
Without the Negro, the top-stone of our national greatness will not be lifted to its predestined lofty altitude for centuries yet to come. Expatriate the Negro, and our cotton-fields whiten no more; our turpentine orchards become silent as the grave; our rice-fields grow up into canebrakes, sheltering the alligator and wild boar.
When Miss, Kemble came first to Boston, in 1832, she sat next to the late John Quincy Adams at dinner one day, and the conversation turned upon the tragedy of “Othello,” Miss Kemble has since reported one of Mr, Adams’ remarks on this subject:—“Talking to me about Desdemona, ho assured me, with a most serious expression of sincere disgust, that he considered all her misfortunes as a very just judgment upon her for having married a nigger.” If this anecdote had not come to us on such respectable authority, we could hardly believe it of a man who, during the last and best ten years of his life, was looked upon as the black man’s champion,
Theodore Parker, who, in pleading for the slave, could “stir his hearers to the bottom of their hearts and soften them to tears;” who, in his famous letter to Millard Fillmore (Nov. 21, 1850), could say:--
I would rather lie all my life in jail and starve there, than refuse to protect one of these parishioners of mine. . . . . William Graft and Ellen were parishioners of mine. They have been at my house. I married them a fortnight ago this day. After the ceremony I put a Bible and then a sword into William’s hands, and told him the use of each. . . . . There hang beside me in my library, as I write, the gun my grandfather fought with at the battle of Lexington—he was a captain on that occasion—and also the musket he captured from a British soldier on that day, the first taken in the war for independence. If I would not peril my property, my liberty, my life, to keep my parishioners out of slavery, then I would throw away these trophies, and should think I was the son of some coward, and not a brave man’s child.[3]
Theodore Parker, who could say, “I should like of all things to see an insurrection of slaves;”[4] who could pronouce that pathetic and touching but terrible discourse over the great Webster; this same Theodore Parker did not think it inconsistent with his high ideal of human liberty and equal rights to write in a private letter as follows:--
Last night I could not coax the thermometer down below 79 degrees any way we could fix it. Now, at eight and a half a.m., I dare not look at it, it is so high. In the midst of the heat, there just came a monstrous African black! O dear, how black he was! Fat! bless me, he looked like a barrel (no, a sugar hogshead) of tar, so black, so fat! What an aggravation, with the thermometer at 90 degrees in the shade![5]
We should have taken this for the irrepressible overflow of harmless witticism but for other disparaging references to the Negro. To Miss Hunt he writes, under date November 10, 1857:--
There are inferior races which have always borne the same ignoble relation to the rest of men, and always will. For two generations what a change there will be in the condition and character of the Irish in New England I But, in twenty generations, the Negroes will stand just where they are now; that is, if they have not disappeared. In Massachusetts there are no laws now to keep the black man from any pursuit, any office, that he will; but there has never been a rich Negro in New England; not a man with ten thousand dollars, perhaps none with five thousand dollars; none eminent in anything except the calling of a waiter.[6]
Again: “In respect to the power of civilisation, the African is at the bottom, the American Indian next.”[7] Again: “When slavery is abolished, the African population will decline in the United States, and die out of the South as out of Northampton and Lexington.”[8]
Mr. Parker, after all he said and did for freedom, seems to have had an invincible contempt for weak and oppressed races. He waged uncompromising warfare against the process by which such peoples are degraded, but had no charity toward those suffering from the results of such process. He fought againt the parent, and ridiculed the offspring. The abstract to him was hateful; the concrete examples contemptible or ludicrous. He scorned the Irish and laughed at the Negro. He speaks of the Irish as follows:--
I don’t know but these Paddies are worse than the Africans to the country. We made a great mistake in attracting them here and allowing them to vote under loss than twenty-one years of quarantine. Certainly it would take all that time to clean a Paddy—on the outside, I mean; to clean him inwardly would be like picking up all the sands of the Sahara. There would be nothing left when the sands were gone.[9]
It is a pity that in speaking of the “gintleman from Car-r-r-k,” as in caricature he describes the Irishman, and of “the poor wretches from Africa,” he did not conform to his own canon of criticism. Speaking of Pierpont, he says: “Just now, considering all that he has done and suffered, it would seem a little ungenerous to be quite just. All pictures must be painted in reference to the light they are to hang in and be looked at.”[10]
Mr. Parker knew the “light” of prejudice and contempt in which his picture of the Negro was to “hang,” and yet, making no allowance for circumstances, and uninfluenced by the laws of moderation, he holds the balance between light and shade with an indifferent hand, paints in the gloomiest possible colours, and thus encourages rather than disarms the falsifying faculty of the observer, predisposed to an unfavourable impression.
Would Mr. Parker have joined Dennis Kearney, and raised a crusade in favour of the inhospitable legislation proposed by the opponents of Chinese immigration? In view of the splendid results in the United States, and in the world generally, of the manly struggle which Mr. Parker maintained for truth and freedom—in view of the large sacrifices which he unquestionably made in the cause of free humanity—many errors of temper and judgment on his part may be forgotten; but the Negro can never forget the slurs upon his race, of which, however, no one, perhaps, more readily than Mr. Parker would now admit the impolicy, if not the injustice. For how do such utterances differ in character and effects from those of the Notts and Gliddons, of the Calhouns and Jeff. Davises? And the fact—which should be suggestive to thinking Negroes in the United States—that they are reproduced in the Biography by Mr. Frothingham, shows that there is a feeling that they are the proper thing to say, even now, about the Negro. Can Congressional legislation remedy the evils produced by such caricatures and misrepresentations? Congress may decree civil rights to the “despised” race in America, and the exigencies of party may occasionally bring the Negro to the front; but what progress can he make when a public sentiment against him is fostered in the writings and in the private intercourse of his friends? In the language of the Liberian Declaration of Eights, “Public sentiment, more powerful than law, will never frown him down.”
The Negro, pure and simple, may rely upon it that, for him, the most enthusiastic of his benefactors sees nothing but the lowest occupations. In the case of the most liberal of his advocates, he will have occasionally to exclaim, Et tu, Brute!
A writer in the Methodist Quarterly Review for January, 1875, on ‘The Negro,’ has the following among the closing sentences of an able and plausible defence of the race:--
Without the Negro, the top-stone of our national greatness will not be lifted to its predestined lofty altitude for centuries yet to come. Expatriate the Negro, and our cotton-fields whiten no more; our turpentine orchards become silent as the grave; our rice-fields grow up into canebrakes, sheltering the alligator and wild boar.
Footnotes:
2 North American Review, Nov.-Dec, 1878.
3 Biography of Theodore Parker; by Octavius Brooks Erothingham.—Boston, James R. Osgood & Co., 1876; pp. 410, 411.
4 Ibid., p. 475.
5 Biography, p. 311.
6 Ibid., p. 467.
7 Ibid., p. 327.
8 Ibid., p. 473.
9 Ibid., p. 473.
10 Biography, p. 329.
2 North American Review, Nov.-Dec, 1878.
3 Biography of Theodore Parker; by Octavius Brooks Erothingham.—Boston, James R. Osgood & Co., 1876; pp. 410, 411.
4 Ibid., p. 475.
5 Biography, p. 311.
6 Ibid., p. 467.
7 Ibid., p. 327.
8 Ibid., p. 473.
9 Ibid., p. 473.
10 Biography, p. 329.
But does the American conscience ever look forward to the time when, in the United States, the Negro will have any common interest in, or any—the slightest possible—control over, the political and financial elements of the country—when he will be needed as a part of the directing agency in the halls of legislation, in counting-houses, and in banking establishments?
Mr. Parton, in the North American Review, says:--
The South is most happy in possessing the Negro, for it is through his assistance that there will be the grand agriculture in the Southern States, which cannot flourish unless there is a class to labour and individuals to contrive. The Southern farmer, by the black man’s help, can be a “scholar and a gentleman,” and at the same time secure and elevate the black man’s life.
Such utterances “give colour to the idea” that the Negro was made to live and improve only in the service, and under the guidance of, a superior. If this view is correct, then why does not the great Creator allow the elect masters to have free access and safe incursion into the natural home of the created slaves, and live in a land where they might hold their predestined proteges in unlimited numbers, and in comfortable service? Why did He make for the slaves so magnificent a country, and surround it with a wall of fire, so that if the master comes to the threshold, he either beats a hasty retreat, or perishes in the attempt to penetrate?
Massa run away, Darkee stay, oh oh!
No; the destiny of the Negro and his marvellous country is veiled from the view of the outside world according to the wise and beneficent purposes of Omniscience.
God is His own interpreter, And He will make it plain.
He can wait, if the impatient Caucasian cannot.
The American Missionary Association (whose publications we have added to this paper in the contents page) in their work of lofty and noble purpose throughout the South, are endeavouring to prepare the Negro for higher spheres of labour than “cotton-fields, turpentine orchards, and rice-fields.” Every Negro who is at all acquainted with matters in the United States must have the highest admiration for that Association. Almost alone among the benevolent institutions of that land in the days of the great struggle, they never, for one moment, yielded to the imperious dictates of an oligarchical monopoly, but gave expression to the idea which they inscribed upon their banner, that one of the chief purposes of their organisation was to resist the tyranny of the autocracy which doomed the Negro to perpetual servitude. No one could be enrolled among the members of their Society who was a “slave- holder.” They have the gratitude of the Negro race.
But history will have a brighter page than even that with which to adorn their annals, when she comes to recount the devotion and sacrifices of the hundreds who have been sent forth, under their auspices, as uplifters of the prostrate host in the South, to whom, left as they were, paralysed by slavery, free movement and real progress were intrinsically impossible without the aid of such agencies as the American Missionary Association. As time rolls on, the romance which clings to those heroes who fought to unfetter the body of the slave will fade beside the halo which will surround those who have laboured to liberate his mind.
We have read, with the deepest interest, the Report and some of the addresses made at the Thirty-second Anniversary of this Association, held in October, 1878, as well as letters from various portions of the field under its supervision. In reading the accounts of the struggles and sufferings of the missionaries, their sorrows and disappointments, their battles and their victories among the lowly in remote and sequestered districts, it is often impossible to repress tears—tears of sympathy, of gratitude, and of joy.
At the Annual Meeting, the Rev. C. M. Southgate said:--
We heard words of hearty praise this afternoon, telling of the success of the work. They tell hardly enough. But these efforts should be redoubled. We want more institutions like those at Atlanta, New Orleans, Charleston, and the other large Southern cities where high culture and intelligence rule. The scholarship can be compared without fear with similar grades at the North. I never heard, in our boasted common schools, such recitations as I have heard from boys as black as the blackest. I know what Yale and Harvard and Dartmouth can show; but, in Greek and Latin, those coloured students can rival their excellence. The culture in morals and manners is at least not inferior, nor the religious instruction less fruitful. The report from the Churches shows as large and as healthy success as we can show here. The young men and women in these institutions have an intense longing to be at work for the Master. The desperate condition of their race rests upon them like a pall. God is making them His prophets, and speaking through them, and sending redemption.
The Rev. Dr. Bascom, in a letter from Alabama, says:--
I see abundant proofs of the beneficent work of your Society here. Could its influence have been exerted in like manner among all our coloured people of the South, the problem so perplexing to politicians and philanthropists, as to the future of this class in our country, would have been already solved.
The Committee on the “Normal Work of the Association” reported that--
The eagerness of the coloured people to obtain at least a rudimentary education has ever been a most encouraging sign. The young man who, last year, walked fifty miles with his trunk upon his back that he might enter school, recalls the zeal of the late Dr. Godell, of Constantinople, who, in his youth, also walked sixty miles with a trunk strapped upon his back, that he might enter Phillips Academy, at Andover. The demand for teachers from the normal schools—quite beyond the ability to supply them— is one of the surest indications that the schools are meeting an urgent need.
Mr. Parton, in the North American Review, says:--
The South is most happy in possessing the Negro, for it is through his assistance that there will be the grand agriculture in the Southern States, which cannot flourish unless there is a class to labour and individuals to contrive. The Southern farmer, by the black man’s help, can be a “scholar and a gentleman,” and at the same time secure and elevate the black man’s life.
Such utterances “give colour to the idea” that the Negro was made to live and improve only in the service, and under the guidance of, a superior. If this view is correct, then why does not the great Creator allow the elect masters to have free access and safe incursion into the natural home of the created slaves, and live in a land where they might hold their predestined proteges in unlimited numbers, and in comfortable service? Why did He make for the slaves so magnificent a country, and surround it with a wall of fire, so that if the master comes to the threshold, he either beats a hasty retreat, or perishes in the attempt to penetrate?
Massa run away, Darkee stay, oh oh!
No; the destiny of the Negro and his marvellous country is veiled from the view of the outside world according to the wise and beneficent purposes of Omniscience.
God is His own interpreter, And He will make it plain.
He can wait, if the impatient Caucasian cannot.
The American Missionary Association (whose publications we have added to this paper in the contents page) in their work of lofty and noble purpose throughout the South, are endeavouring to prepare the Negro for higher spheres of labour than “cotton-fields, turpentine orchards, and rice-fields.” Every Negro who is at all acquainted with matters in the United States must have the highest admiration for that Association. Almost alone among the benevolent institutions of that land in the days of the great struggle, they never, for one moment, yielded to the imperious dictates of an oligarchical monopoly, but gave expression to the idea which they inscribed upon their banner, that one of the chief purposes of their organisation was to resist the tyranny of the autocracy which doomed the Negro to perpetual servitude. No one could be enrolled among the members of their Society who was a “slave- holder.” They have the gratitude of the Negro race.
But history will have a brighter page than even that with which to adorn their annals, when she comes to recount the devotion and sacrifices of the hundreds who have been sent forth, under their auspices, as uplifters of the prostrate host in the South, to whom, left as they were, paralysed by slavery, free movement and real progress were intrinsically impossible without the aid of such agencies as the American Missionary Association. As time rolls on, the romance which clings to those heroes who fought to unfetter the body of the slave will fade beside the halo which will surround those who have laboured to liberate his mind.
We have read, with the deepest interest, the Report and some of the addresses made at the Thirty-second Anniversary of this Association, held in October, 1878, as well as letters from various portions of the field under its supervision. In reading the accounts of the struggles and sufferings of the missionaries, their sorrows and disappointments, their battles and their victories among the lowly in remote and sequestered districts, it is often impossible to repress tears—tears of sympathy, of gratitude, and of joy.
At the Annual Meeting, the Rev. C. M. Southgate said:--
We heard words of hearty praise this afternoon, telling of the success of the work. They tell hardly enough. But these efforts should be redoubled. We want more institutions like those at Atlanta, New Orleans, Charleston, and the other large Southern cities where high culture and intelligence rule. The scholarship can be compared without fear with similar grades at the North. I never heard, in our boasted common schools, such recitations as I have heard from boys as black as the blackest. I know what Yale and Harvard and Dartmouth can show; but, in Greek and Latin, those coloured students can rival their excellence. The culture in morals and manners is at least not inferior, nor the religious instruction less fruitful. The report from the Churches shows as large and as healthy success as we can show here. The young men and women in these institutions have an intense longing to be at work for the Master. The desperate condition of their race rests upon them like a pall. God is making them His prophets, and speaking through them, and sending redemption.
The Rev. Dr. Bascom, in a letter from Alabama, says:--
I see abundant proofs of the beneficent work of your Society here. Could its influence have been exerted in like manner among all our coloured people of the South, the problem so perplexing to politicians and philanthropists, as to the future of this class in our country, would have been already solved.
The Committee on the “Normal Work of the Association” reported that--
The eagerness of the coloured people to obtain at least a rudimentary education has ever been a most encouraging sign. The young man who, last year, walked fifty miles with his trunk upon his back that he might enter school, recalls the zeal of the late Dr. Godell, of Constantinople, who, in his youth, also walked sixty miles with a trunk strapped upon his back, that he might enter Phillips Academy, at Andover. The demand for teachers from the normal schools—quite beyond the ability to supply them— is one of the surest indications that the schools are meeting an urgent need.
We regret that Professor Hartranft, in his able address on the “Five Tests of American Civilisation,” should have spoken of the “brutality of the Negro.” In what portion of the United States has that “brutality” been shown? Such a charge is in flagrant contradiction to all the testimony borne of the Negro by those who know him best.
And here we must venture to enter our earnest protest against the use of such phrases as “The Despised Races,” which we see frequently used of late in the publications of the American Missionary Association. The Rev. Joseph Cook addressed the Association on the “Three Despised Races,” and he was followed by the Rev. C. M. Southgate on “Puritanism and the Despised Races.” Such expressions as “The Despised Race” and “The Dark Continent,” applied to the Negro and his ancestral home, have not, we fancy, the most salutary effect either upon those who employ them or upon those to whom they refer; in the one they often beget arrogance; in the other, servility or resentment. They do more than serve the ad captandum purposes for which they are probably intended. In using “great plainness of speech” the instructors of humanity should be “wise as serpents and harmless as doves,” which, according to a Negro interpreter, means “an ounce of serpent to a pound of dove.” Moreover, the whole of the rest of mankind does not hold the European, in view of his past history, in such unqualified admiration as to admit without serious question that he has a right to embody in terse phrases, and to parade in the titles of books, pamphlets, and addresses his contempt for other races. There are those of other races who also sneer and scorn and “despise.” Some of the proceedings of Baker and Stanley in Africa must frequently have impressed the natives with the feeling that those energetic travellers came from much “darker continents” than any their unsophisticated imaginations had ever before suggested to them. The African now coming forward through education and culture cannot have unlimited respect for all the qualities of the European races: “A people with a passion for taking away the countries of others and dignifying the robbery as conquests; and whose systematic cruelty has been shown for ages, in chaining, buying, and selling another race.” The intelligent Negro feels that the part of the oppressor is not less to be despised than the part of the oppressed-that the part of the man- stealer and man-seller is far more contemptible than the part of the man stolen and sold. And this he will feel more and more. The brilliancy of the universal and prolonged success which has given the European the idea that he has a right to despise others, and to proclaim the fact—the glories which have followed in the wake of his progress and conquests—are getting sadly dimmed in the light of a fuller understanding of the Gospel of Christ. Under the searching criticisms of rising intellects imbued with the essence of a Christian philosophy, and influenced by the spirit of a science properly so called, those brutal instincts which received the eulogiums of the past are finding their proper recognition as elements of character to be reprobated and suppressed. The Bosworth Smiths of to-day are superseding the Carlyles of yesterday. Might no longer makes right. The motto on the British coat-of- arms is being slightly altered—not “God and my Right,” but “God and the Right.” Whatever “smacks of saltpetre”[11] is being deprecated and condemned. Says the eloquent author of Carthage and the Carthaginians:--
It is equally reprehensible, whether it be the plunder of half of Europe by the representative of one of its most enlightened nations, the arch-robber of modern times, Napoleon; or the sack of a Chinese palace by those whom the Chinese had a right, in this instance at least, to style Barbarians. If good men and great nations have hitherto often followed the example of Cicero in drawing a broad contrast between the extortions of a Verres and the highhanded plunder of Marcellus, a Warren Hastings, or a Napoleon, it is because they have not yet reached the moral standard which condemns the public robber; they look askance only at a thief.[12]
History, then, as it is read by the thinking Negro, will not diminish the vehemence of his protest against the injustice of being regarded by the European as belonging to a “despised race,” nor lessen the grounds of his desire to reciprocate the disparaging sentiment. His hands are free from the blood of other men. He has not in any way oppressed other races. He has suffered, and that is all. He has been scattered and peeled, despoiled and plundered, abused, persecuted, and down-trodden, and that is all. The late Professor Tayler Lewis, of Union College, when he was once asked the flippant question, “What shall we do with the Negro?” replied, “And pray, sir, what shall the Negro do with you? It is my logic, with no disrespect to anybody, that one question is as fair as the other.”[13]
And here we must venture to enter our earnest protest against the use of such phrases as “The Despised Races,” which we see frequently used of late in the publications of the American Missionary Association. The Rev. Joseph Cook addressed the Association on the “Three Despised Races,” and he was followed by the Rev. C. M. Southgate on “Puritanism and the Despised Races.” Such expressions as “The Despised Race” and “The Dark Continent,” applied to the Negro and his ancestral home, have not, we fancy, the most salutary effect either upon those who employ them or upon those to whom they refer; in the one they often beget arrogance; in the other, servility or resentment. They do more than serve the ad captandum purposes for which they are probably intended. In using “great plainness of speech” the instructors of humanity should be “wise as serpents and harmless as doves,” which, according to a Negro interpreter, means “an ounce of serpent to a pound of dove.” Moreover, the whole of the rest of mankind does not hold the European, in view of his past history, in such unqualified admiration as to admit without serious question that he has a right to embody in terse phrases, and to parade in the titles of books, pamphlets, and addresses his contempt for other races. There are those of other races who also sneer and scorn and “despise.” Some of the proceedings of Baker and Stanley in Africa must frequently have impressed the natives with the feeling that those energetic travellers came from much “darker continents” than any their unsophisticated imaginations had ever before suggested to them. The African now coming forward through education and culture cannot have unlimited respect for all the qualities of the European races: “A people with a passion for taking away the countries of others and dignifying the robbery as conquests; and whose systematic cruelty has been shown for ages, in chaining, buying, and selling another race.” The intelligent Negro feels that the part of the oppressor is not less to be despised than the part of the oppressed-that the part of the man- stealer and man-seller is far more contemptible than the part of the man stolen and sold. And this he will feel more and more. The brilliancy of the universal and prolonged success which has given the European the idea that he has a right to despise others, and to proclaim the fact—the glories which have followed in the wake of his progress and conquests—are getting sadly dimmed in the light of a fuller understanding of the Gospel of Christ. Under the searching criticisms of rising intellects imbued with the essence of a Christian philosophy, and influenced by the spirit of a science properly so called, those brutal instincts which received the eulogiums of the past are finding their proper recognition as elements of character to be reprobated and suppressed. The Bosworth Smiths of to-day are superseding the Carlyles of yesterday. Might no longer makes right. The motto on the British coat-of- arms is being slightly altered—not “God and my Right,” but “God and the Right.” Whatever “smacks of saltpetre”[11] is being deprecated and condemned. Says the eloquent author of Carthage and the Carthaginians:--
It is equally reprehensible, whether it be the plunder of half of Europe by the representative of one of its most enlightened nations, the arch-robber of modern times, Napoleon; or the sack of a Chinese palace by those whom the Chinese had a right, in this instance at least, to style Barbarians. If good men and great nations have hitherto often followed the example of Cicero in drawing a broad contrast between the extortions of a Verres and the highhanded plunder of Marcellus, a Warren Hastings, or a Napoleon, it is because they have not yet reached the moral standard which condemns the public robber; they look askance only at a thief.[12]
History, then, as it is read by the thinking Negro, will not diminish the vehemence of his protest against the injustice of being regarded by the European as belonging to a “despised race,” nor lessen the grounds of his desire to reciprocate the disparaging sentiment. His hands are free from the blood of other men. He has not in any way oppressed other races. He has suffered, and that is all. He has been scattered and peeled, despoiled and plundered, abused, persecuted, and down-trodden, and that is all. The late Professor Tayler Lewis, of Union College, when he was once asked the flippant question, “What shall we do with the Negro?” replied, “And pray, sir, what shall the Negro do with you? It is my logic, with no disrespect to anybody, that one question is as fair as the other.”[13]
Footnotes:
11 Lord Salisbury’s Speech in the House of Lords, 1879.
12 Carthage and the Carthaginians; by R. Bosworth Smith, M.A., Assistant Master in Harrow School, &Co.—London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1878. When Dr. Johnson expressed a hope that he might never hear of the Punic Wars again, he never anticipated anything like this brilliant and charming work—this startling investment in flesh and blood of the dry bones of Carthaginian history.
13 Methodist Quarterly Review, Oct. 1878, p. 617,
11 Lord Salisbury’s Speech in the House of Lords, 1879.
12 Carthage and the Carthaginians; by R. Bosworth Smith, M.A., Assistant Master in Harrow School, &Co.—London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1878. When Dr. Johnson expressed a hope that he might never hear of the Punic Wars again, he never anticipated anything like this brilliant and charming work—this startling investment in flesh and blood of the dry bones of Carthaginian history.
13 Methodist Quarterly Review, Oct. 1878, p. 617,
The Negroes on the African continent who have not read European history are divided into two classes, namely, those who have seen and had intercourse with the Europeans, and those who have never seen but only heard of them. The view taken by the former at this moment was exactly that described by Mungo Park a hundred years ago.14 A century has made no change. Of the impressions of the latter we have a fair specimen in one of Stanley’s amusing anecdotes. That distinguished traveller, describing the people on the south-western shores of Lake Tanganyika, says:--
The conduct of the first natives to whom we were introduced pleased us all. They showed themselves in a very amiable light, sold their corn cheaply and without fuss, behaved themselves decently and with propriety, though their principal men, entertaining very strange ideas of white men, carefully concealed themselves from view, and refused to be tempted to expose themselves within view or hearing of us.
Their doubts of our character were reported to us by a friendly young Arab as follows: “Kassanga, chief of Ruanda, says, ‘How can the white men be good when they come for no trade, whose feet one never sees, who always go covered from head to foot with clothes? Do not tell me they are good anfriendly. There is something very mysterious about them; perhaps wicked. Probably they are magicians; at any rate, it is better to leave them alone, and to keep close until they are gone.’”
And again:--
In these people we first saw the mild, amiable, unsophisticated innocence of this part of Central Africa, and their behaviour was exactly the reverse of the wild, ferocious, cannibalistic races the Arabs have described to us.[15]
After the disparaging view of the Negro taken by Professor Hartranft, it is not surprising that he should have exclaimed:--
As to the African, there are not a few Americans, even in this day, who think a righteous solution of the African question is to ship them all off to the Dark Continent. So far as the American Colonisation Society keeps in view education and other Christian instrumentalities I bid them God-speed; but if they desire to send the Negro out of the country, I say, No!—a thousand times, No! Let us solve the problem right here where God has placed them.
We cannot help repeating the last words of the paragraph—“right here where God has placed them”—and we think of the sanguinary scenes attending the capture and deportation of their fathers from the ancestral land; the devastation of flourishing districts; the desolation and ruin by fire and sword; the pillage, the plunder, the murders, and the horrors of the middle passage.
There was among philanthropists a difference of opinion when these people, or their fathers, were being shipped to America; and Professor Hartranft is not alone in his benevolent scruples about shipping them back to the “Dark Continent.”
The Rev. Sylvanus Heywood, who seems to have a higher appreciation of the race and of its work, speaks of the Negro as the “black diamond plucked out of Africa,” and advocates for him an education the same in character and completeness as that given to the white man. He says:--
You may enact laws and hedge them about with penalties for securing the rights of the blacks, but law alone will prove a failure. But give to them the highest Christian culture, and they will not only demand, but command, their rights. Give them a common school education, and it will be a blessing to them; but with nothing more they will remain but hewers of wood and drawers of water. They will be in society, but not of it. But give them the highest culture among cultured men, and the case will be far different. It is too late in the day to raise the question whether they are capable of this. This Association has demonstrated that day by day. I have spent ten years as a teacher among the whites, and two among the blacks, and I must say that I accomplished more in those two years than in ten—more in the way of giving instruction. I say, it is too late to raise that question at all. It is already demonstrated. Let them be educated with broad culture. Let them have the training that will put them in possession of practical skill, such as shall win success. Let them have their own lawyers well trained in legal lore, so that they shall be able—in that natural eloquence in which they excel—to carry conviction to dignified courts. Let them have clergymen, not only earnest and sanctified, but able to cope with the deep things of science and theology—men able to stand before the most learned bodies. Let them have statesmen, well grounded in philosophy, history, and government, so that they will be able, not only to win victories upon the stump, but in the halls of legislation. Let their homes become homes of Christian culture and social refinement. Then, and not till then, will they cease to struggle for their rights and take them.
But Mr. Hey wood takes also a much broader view of the logical and necessary sequence of all this high culture—of all this effective training. He points to the fatherland. His philosophy is correct. For the Negro, pure and simple, this is the only real solution of his difficulties. He says:--
The ways of God are mysterious. We must walk by faith, and not by sight. We hear His voice saying, “This is the way; walk ye in it.” In this darkness we see His hand. In the raising of this Society and the doing away with slavery, we can see almost visibly the hand of God displayed upon the midnight sky, pointing to that dark continent, saying we should send these freemen forth as the apostles of light to purify and make glad their ancestral homes.
No man who has any proper conception of the capacities and work of the Negro, and has caught anything like a glimpse of his ultimate destiny, can fail to arrive at Mr. Heywood’s conclusion. To the intelligent and earnest Negro in America, there is, as he rises in culture, an ever-widening horizon of duty and of liberty—Home, or rather the place of his birth, gets too narrow for liberty, too circumscribed for work, and he looks to Africa as the field for both.
In an able article in the London Times for May 19, on the Negro migration in the United States, the following words occur:--
The truth is, that the Negro is not a migratory being. He did not come of his own accord to Virginia, or any other Southern State; nor will he willingly leave it again now that he is acclimatised there. He has found an Africa in the South which is quite as congenial to him as that from which his forefathers were transported.
The conduct of the first natives to whom we were introduced pleased us all. They showed themselves in a very amiable light, sold their corn cheaply and without fuss, behaved themselves decently and with propriety, though their principal men, entertaining very strange ideas of white men, carefully concealed themselves from view, and refused to be tempted to expose themselves within view or hearing of us.
Their doubts of our character were reported to us by a friendly young Arab as follows: “Kassanga, chief of Ruanda, says, ‘How can the white men be good when they come for no trade, whose feet one never sees, who always go covered from head to foot with clothes? Do not tell me they are good anfriendly. There is something very mysterious about them; perhaps wicked. Probably they are magicians; at any rate, it is better to leave them alone, and to keep close until they are gone.’”
And again:--
In these people we first saw the mild, amiable, unsophisticated innocence of this part of Central Africa, and their behaviour was exactly the reverse of the wild, ferocious, cannibalistic races the Arabs have described to us.[15]
After the disparaging view of the Negro taken by Professor Hartranft, it is not surprising that he should have exclaimed:--
As to the African, there are not a few Americans, even in this day, who think a righteous solution of the African question is to ship them all off to the Dark Continent. So far as the American Colonisation Society keeps in view education and other Christian instrumentalities I bid them God-speed; but if they desire to send the Negro out of the country, I say, No!—a thousand times, No! Let us solve the problem right here where God has placed them.
We cannot help repeating the last words of the paragraph—“right here where God has placed them”—and we think of the sanguinary scenes attending the capture and deportation of their fathers from the ancestral land; the devastation of flourishing districts; the desolation and ruin by fire and sword; the pillage, the plunder, the murders, and the horrors of the middle passage.
There was among philanthropists a difference of opinion when these people, or their fathers, were being shipped to America; and Professor Hartranft is not alone in his benevolent scruples about shipping them back to the “Dark Continent.”
The Rev. Sylvanus Heywood, who seems to have a higher appreciation of the race and of its work, speaks of the Negro as the “black diamond plucked out of Africa,” and advocates for him an education the same in character and completeness as that given to the white man. He says:--
You may enact laws and hedge them about with penalties for securing the rights of the blacks, but law alone will prove a failure. But give to them the highest Christian culture, and they will not only demand, but command, their rights. Give them a common school education, and it will be a blessing to them; but with nothing more they will remain but hewers of wood and drawers of water. They will be in society, but not of it. But give them the highest culture among cultured men, and the case will be far different. It is too late in the day to raise the question whether they are capable of this. This Association has demonstrated that day by day. I have spent ten years as a teacher among the whites, and two among the blacks, and I must say that I accomplished more in those two years than in ten—more in the way of giving instruction. I say, it is too late to raise that question at all. It is already demonstrated. Let them be educated with broad culture. Let them have the training that will put them in possession of practical skill, such as shall win success. Let them have their own lawyers well trained in legal lore, so that they shall be able—in that natural eloquence in which they excel—to carry conviction to dignified courts. Let them have clergymen, not only earnest and sanctified, but able to cope with the deep things of science and theology—men able to stand before the most learned bodies. Let them have statesmen, well grounded in philosophy, history, and government, so that they will be able, not only to win victories upon the stump, but in the halls of legislation. Let their homes become homes of Christian culture and social refinement. Then, and not till then, will they cease to struggle for their rights and take them.
But Mr. Hey wood takes also a much broader view of the logical and necessary sequence of all this high culture—of all this effective training. He points to the fatherland. His philosophy is correct. For the Negro, pure and simple, this is the only real solution of his difficulties. He says:--
The ways of God are mysterious. We must walk by faith, and not by sight. We hear His voice saying, “This is the way; walk ye in it.” In this darkness we see His hand. In the raising of this Society and the doing away with slavery, we can see almost visibly the hand of God displayed upon the midnight sky, pointing to that dark continent, saying we should send these freemen forth as the apostles of light to purify and make glad their ancestral homes.
No man who has any proper conception of the capacities and work of the Negro, and has caught anything like a glimpse of his ultimate destiny, can fail to arrive at Mr. Heywood’s conclusion. To the intelligent and earnest Negro in America, there is, as he rises in culture, an ever-widening horizon of duty and of liberty—Home, or rather the place of his birth, gets too narrow for liberty, too circumscribed for work, and he looks to Africa as the field for both.
In an able article in the London Times for May 19, on the Negro migration in the United States, the following words occur:--
The truth is, that the Negro is not a migratory being. He did not come of his own accord to Virginia, or any other Southern State; nor will he willingly leave it again now that he is acclimatised there. He has found an Africa in the South which is quite as congenial to him as that from which his forefathers were transported.
Footnotes:
14 Park's Travels.
15 Through the Dark Continent; vol. ii, pp. 68, 69.
14 Park's Travels.
15 Through the Dark Continent; vol. ii, pp. 68, 69.
On the subject of the Negro, The Times and everybody else, not African, are utterly in the dark. An acknowledged mystery hangs about him and his destiny. Foreigners do not know the Negro. They have never had an opportunity of knowing him. Foreign slavery on the one hand, and aboriginal barbarism on the other, are the only circumstances under which they have had an opportunity of contemplating him. It is true that the “Negro is not a migratory being.” He would never have appeared on American soil, if he had not been taken thither by violence. And the restlessness he now shows is among the strongest proofs of his freedom. He is now free to think and act for himself, and the consciousness of being a stranger in a strange land is beginning to operate upon him. The Times admits that “this is not the first symptom of a desire for change among the coloured citizens;” and yet it fancies that the Negro has found “an Africa in the South which is quite as congenial to him as that from which his forefathers were transported.” The fact is, that the Negro is getting, every day, more and more into a position to show himself no longer a dormant, but an active, factor among the forces of civilisation, and the European will witness, almost daily, new developments in his character—the exhibition of qualities never suspected. Next to ridicule, one of the most repulsive things to a sensitive mind is sympathy unduly extended, especially when the sympathiser has no means of correctly estimating the situation which he imagines should call forth his sympathy. There are very few Europeans who are qualified either to guide or to sympathise with the Negro in the countries of his exile; and gratuitous advice, even from these, in vital questions of his race, has no practical influence upon him.
“The enthusiasm for Liberia” has not died out, as The Times imagines. The American Colonisation Society has at this moment five hundred thousand applicants for passage to Liberia. Dr. A. L. Stanford, a Negro of culture, who was sent last year as Commissioner to Liberia from his people in Arkansas, returned with a favourable report, in which he says:--
After travelling extensively in Liberia and observing the prosperous condition of the colony which the American Colonisation Society has planted—and, I am convinced, firmly established—I am prepared to lend my aid in disabusing the public mind in regard to the noble efforts put forth by that Society in elevating the downtrodden Negro race. I entertain very different views from what I held before. I verily believe that Africa is the natural home of the Negro, and that ere long the remnant of her descendants, wherever dispersed, will return to that land. I favour a gradual emigration of the more enterprising, hard-working, and intelligent class of American Negroes. I believe such a course would prove a blessing to Africa and to the race.[16]
It is admitted by all travellers to the coast that Liberia occupies five hundred miles of the finest and most picturesque portion of West Africa, with an interior extending two hundred miles or indefinitely back, abounding in everything necessary for the growth and prosperity of a people. The whole valley of the Niger is accessible to this Republic, teeming with a population everywhere hospitable and friendly, ready and anxious to welcome to their salubrious, prolific, and picturesque home, their brethren returning from the countries of their exile.
In the trade and commerce of this country there seems to be a special interest, not only for the Negroes in the United States, but for the whole American people. There would be unlimited demand for American productions in that vast region now almost untouched. Gold, and hides, and beeswax, and rubber, as well as the finest coffee, might be had in unlimited quantities. Not far from Liberia are the unvisited but easily accessible and wealthy countries north and west of Ashantee and Dahomey, possessing the very highest capacity for the consumption of manufactured articles and for the production of raw material—from which a prodigious trade, struggling for an outlet, filters through, in very small quantities, to the Gulf of Benin.
Viewing the subject in this light, it becomes a practical business question whether there are no large capitalists in the Northern or Southern States willing to invest in an entirely virgin country, so much nearer to the United States than many of those countries from which at great expense tropical productions are now obtained for the American market—a field where agriculture may find unobstructed scope; where so many results, moral, political and pecuniary, may be at once achieved; and where a Christian nation, with its multifarious agencies for diffusing civilisation, may be built up. If American capitalists desired to engage in agriculture, fund to produce the far-famed Liberia coffee, or any other tropical product, they could themselves select and send out able hands from America for this work, who, while building up a congenial home for themselves and their children, and making “the wilderness and solitary place glad “for their presence, would be also enlarging the wealth of their patrons.
At a banquet given in Paris on the 19th of May, 1879, in commemoration of the abolition of slavery, M. Victor Hugo said: “In the nineteenth century, the white man has made the Negro a man, and, in the twentieth century, Europe will make Africa a world.”
We admire the epigrammatic form of this sentence, but we venture to disagree with the sentiment it contains. As philosopher and prophet, the great poet is in this instance mistaken. Poetical inspirations do not always suggest sound political lessons. But what he said further on in his speech should be carefully pondered by all intelligent Negroes everywhere. He said:--
The day had come for the vast continent which alone among the five parts of the world had no history, to be reformed by Europeans. The Mediterranean was a lake of civilisation, and it was the duty of Greece and of Italy, of France and of Spain, the four countries that occupied its northern shores, to recollect that a vast territory lay unredeemed on the opposite coast. England was also worthy to take part in the great work. She, like Prance, was one of the great free nations of the globe; and, like France, she had begun the colonisation and civilisation of Africa. The latter held the north and east, the former the south and the west. America had joined in the task, and Italy was ready to do so. This showed the unity of spirit which pervaded the people of the world. M. Victor Hugo then described the magnificent scenery, the fertility, and the navigable rivers of Central Africa in eloquent language, and concluded by exhorting the European nations to occupy this land offered to them by God, to build towns, to make roads, to cultivate the earth, to introduce trade and commerce, to preach peace and concord; so that the new continent should not be the scene of strife, but, free from princes and priests, should enjoy the blessings of fraternity.[17]
“The enthusiasm for Liberia” has not died out, as The Times imagines. The American Colonisation Society has at this moment five hundred thousand applicants for passage to Liberia. Dr. A. L. Stanford, a Negro of culture, who was sent last year as Commissioner to Liberia from his people in Arkansas, returned with a favourable report, in which he says:--
After travelling extensively in Liberia and observing the prosperous condition of the colony which the American Colonisation Society has planted—and, I am convinced, firmly established—I am prepared to lend my aid in disabusing the public mind in regard to the noble efforts put forth by that Society in elevating the downtrodden Negro race. I entertain very different views from what I held before. I verily believe that Africa is the natural home of the Negro, and that ere long the remnant of her descendants, wherever dispersed, will return to that land. I favour a gradual emigration of the more enterprising, hard-working, and intelligent class of American Negroes. I believe such a course would prove a blessing to Africa and to the race.[16]
It is admitted by all travellers to the coast that Liberia occupies five hundred miles of the finest and most picturesque portion of West Africa, with an interior extending two hundred miles or indefinitely back, abounding in everything necessary for the growth and prosperity of a people. The whole valley of the Niger is accessible to this Republic, teeming with a population everywhere hospitable and friendly, ready and anxious to welcome to their salubrious, prolific, and picturesque home, their brethren returning from the countries of their exile.
In the trade and commerce of this country there seems to be a special interest, not only for the Negroes in the United States, but for the whole American people. There would be unlimited demand for American productions in that vast region now almost untouched. Gold, and hides, and beeswax, and rubber, as well as the finest coffee, might be had in unlimited quantities. Not far from Liberia are the unvisited but easily accessible and wealthy countries north and west of Ashantee and Dahomey, possessing the very highest capacity for the consumption of manufactured articles and for the production of raw material—from which a prodigious trade, struggling for an outlet, filters through, in very small quantities, to the Gulf of Benin.
Viewing the subject in this light, it becomes a practical business question whether there are no large capitalists in the Northern or Southern States willing to invest in an entirely virgin country, so much nearer to the United States than many of those countries from which at great expense tropical productions are now obtained for the American market—a field where agriculture may find unobstructed scope; where so many results, moral, political and pecuniary, may be at once achieved; and where a Christian nation, with its multifarious agencies for diffusing civilisation, may be built up. If American capitalists desired to engage in agriculture, fund to produce the far-famed Liberia coffee, or any other tropical product, they could themselves select and send out able hands from America for this work, who, while building up a congenial home for themselves and their children, and making “the wilderness and solitary place glad “for their presence, would be also enlarging the wealth of their patrons.
At a banquet given in Paris on the 19th of May, 1879, in commemoration of the abolition of slavery, M. Victor Hugo said: “In the nineteenth century, the white man has made the Negro a man, and, in the twentieth century, Europe will make Africa a world.”
We admire the epigrammatic form of this sentence, but we venture to disagree with the sentiment it contains. As philosopher and prophet, the great poet is in this instance mistaken. Poetical inspirations do not always suggest sound political lessons. But what he said further on in his speech should be carefully pondered by all intelligent Negroes everywhere. He said:--
The day had come for the vast continent which alone among the five parts of the world had no history, to be reformed by Europeans. The Mediterranean was a lake of civilisation, and it was the duty of Greece and of Italy, of France and of Spain, the four countries that occupied its northern shores, to recollect that a vast territory lay unredeemed on the opposite coast. England was also worthy to take part in the great work. She, like Prance, was one of the great free nations of the globe; and, like France, she had begun the colonisation and civilisation of Africa. The latter held the north and east, the former the south and the west. America had joined in the task, and Italy was ready to do so. This showed the unity of spirit which pervaded the people of the world. M. Victor Hugo then described the magnificent scenery, the fertility, and the navigable rivers of Central Africa in eloquent language, and concluded by exhorting the European nations to occupy this land offered to them by God, to build towns, to make roads, to cultivate the earth, to introduce trade and commerce, to preach peace and concord; so that the new continent should not be the scene of strife, but, free from princes and priests, should enjoy the blessings of fraternity.[17]
Footnotes:
16 African Repository, April, 1879; pp. 40, 41.
17 Daily Telegraph, May 20.
16 African Repository, April, 1879; pp. 40, 41.
17 Daily Telegraph, May 20.
It is really high time that a “unity of spirit should pervade the peoples of the world” for the regeneration of a continent so long despoiled by the unity or consent of these same peoples. Thinking Negroes should ask themselves what part they will take in this magnificent work, the work of reclaiming a continent—their won continent. In what way will they illustrate their participation in the “unity of spirit” which pervades the peoples for the redemption of their fatherland? Compared to this, most of the questions with which they are endeavouring to grapple in the United States, sink into insignificance. The local can bear no comparison to the universal, nor the temporary to the eternal.
Victor Hugo exhorts the European nations to “occupy this land offered to them by God.” He has forgotten the prudent advice of Cæsar to the ancestors of those nations against invading Africa. The Europeans can hold the domain “offered to them” by only a precarious tenure. But it already belongs to the exiled Negro. It is his by creation and inheritance. Every man, woman, and child of the Negro race out of Africa ought to thank God for this glorious heritage, and hasten to possess it—a field for the physical, moral, and spiritual development of the Negro, where he will live under the influence of his freshest inspirations; where, with the simple shield of faith in God and in his race, and with the sword of the spirit of progress, he will grow and thrive; where, with his sympathetic heart, he will catch stray, far-off tones, inaudible to the foreigner, which, penetrating through the local air, will waken chords in his nature now unknown to the world, and unsuspected even by himself. He will come under the influence of powers which will haunt him with strange visions, and indicate the way he should go. Emerson says:--
A man’s genius, the quality that differences him from every other, the susceptibility to one class of influences, the selection of what is fit for him, the rejection of what is unfit, determines for him the character of the universe. A man is a method, a progressive arrangement, a selecting principle, gathering his like to him wherever he goes. He takes only his own out of the multiplicity that sweeps and circles round him. He is like one of those booms which are set out from the shore on rivers to catch drift-wood, or like the loadstone among splinters of steel. . . . . A few anecdotes, a few traits of character, manners, face, a few incidents, have an emphasis in your memory out of all proportion to their apparent significance, if you measure them by the ordinary standards. They relate to your gift. Let them have their weight, and do not reject them and cast about for illustrations and facts more useful to literature. What your heart thinks great is great. The soul’s emphasis is always right.[18]
When Professor Hartranft says, “Let us solve the Negro problem right here,” in America, to what “problem” does he refer? and how does he propose to solve the great questions of the African race in the United States? There are certain problems at times set before a people by accidental and temporary circumstances; these may admit of solution by extraneous help. There are others which grow out of their natural, inherent, and unchangeable relation to the outside world, or the universe; these are to be solved by the people themselves under favouring circumstances; the trusts and responsibilities which these impose are special, incommunicable, and inalienable. But probably Professor Hartranft means the problem pressing upon the white man in his relations to the Negro; the problem of his duty toward the “despised” race—his power to arrive at a satisfactory solution being a “test” of his civilisation. In regard to this, of course, we can suggest nothing. But, from all we can gather, it appears that the chief problem held up to the Negro for his solution by his friends in America is that of “conquering the caste prejudices of the whites” around him; of becoming, as the usual phrase is, “a man among men” (white men); of “wiping out the colour line,” &c. Now, we beg most respectfully, with all the earnestness and deference becoming the subject, and with the serious emphasis which we know the enlightened of the race would authorise us to employ, to assure our white friends that these are matters for which the Negro, when cultivated up to Mr. Heywood’s standard, will care very little. He will then feel that, in his own race-groove and on his own continent, he has a work to accomplish equal to that of the European, and that caste or race prejudices are as natural to him as to the white man. The passion for equality does not always exert an elevating influence on the character, but may be positively mischievous where, to produce or sustain it, certain sentiments in themind are flattered by holding the higher attributes in abeyance, or brought into prominence at the expense of judgment and love of truth.
Ripe scholarship and disciplined thought, even under the training he is receiving in America, will give to the Negro a freshness, a manliness, a hopefulness, and a faith which will deliver him from the tyranny of his surroundings, widen his view of his own capabilities, make him conscious of belonging to a race which has rich things in store for the world, and glorify his heart with a thousand strange and fruitful sympathies, and with endless heroic aspirations.
Victor Hugo exhorts the European nations to “occupy this land offered to them by God.” He has forgotten the prudent advice of Cæsar to the ancestors of those nations against invading Africa. The Europeans can hold the domain “offered to them” by only a precarious tenure. But it already belongs to the exiled Negro. It is his by creation and inheritance. Every man, woman, and child of the Negro race out of Africa ought to thank God for this glorious heritage, and hasten to possess it—a field for the physical, moral, and spiritual development of the Negro, where he will live under the influence of his freshest inspirations; where, with the simple shield of faith in God and in his race, and with the sword of the spirit of progress, he will grow and thrive; where, with his sympathetic heart, he will catch stray, far-off tones, inaudible to the foreigner, which, penetrating through the local air, will waken chords in his nature now unknown to the world, and unsuspected even by himself. He will come under the influence of powers which will haunt him with strange visions, and indicate the way he should go. Emerson says:--
A man’s genius, the quality that differences him from every other, the susceptibility to one class of influences, the selection of what is fit for him, the rejection of what is unfit, determines for him the character of the universe. A man is a method, a progressive arrangement, a selecting principle, gathering his like to him wherever he goes. He takes only his own out of the multiplicity that sweeps and circles round him. He is like one of those booms which are set out from the shore on rivers to catch drift-wood, or like the loadstone among splinters of steel. . . . . A few anecdotes, a few traits of character, manners, face, a few incidents, have an emphasis in your memory out of all proportion to their apparent significance, if you measure them by the ordinary standards. They relate to your gift. Let them have their weight, and do not reject them and cast about for illustrations and facts more useful to literature. What your heart thinks great is great. The soul’s emphasis is always right.[18]
When Professor Hartranft says, “Let us solve the Negro problem right here,” in America, to what “problem” does he refer? and how does he propose to solve the great questions of the African race in the United States? There are certain problems at times set before a people by accidental and temporary circumstances; these may admit of solution by extraneous help. There are others which grow out of their natural, inherent, and unchangeable relation to the outside world, or the universe; these are to be solved by the people themselves under favouring circumstances; the trusts and responsibilities which these impose are special, incommunicable, and inalienable. But probably Professor Hartranft means the problem pressing upon the white man in his relations to the Negro; the problem of his duty toward the “despised” race—his power to arrive at a satisfactory solution being a “test” of his civilisation. In regard to this, of course, we can suggest nothing. But, from all we can gather, it appears that the chief problem held up to the Negro for his solution by his friends in America is that of “conquering the caste prejudices of the whites” around him; of becoming, as the usual phrase is, “a man among men” (white men); of “wiping out the colour line,” &c. Now, we beg most respectfully, with all the earnestness and deference becoming the subject, and with the serious emphasis which we know the enlightened of the race would authorise us to employ, to assure our white friends that these are matters for which the Negro, when cultivated up to Mr. Heywood’s standard, will care very little. He will then feel that, in his own race-groove and on his own continent, he has a work to accomplish equal to that of the European, and that caste or race prejudices are as natural to him as to the white man. The passion for equality does not always exert an elevating influence on the character, but may be positively mischievous where, to produce or sustain it, certain sentiments in themind are flattered by holding the higher attributes in abeyance, or brought into prominence at the expense of judgment and love of truth.
Ripe scholarship and disciplined thought, even under the training he is receiving in America, will give to the Negro a freshness, a manliness, a hopefulness, and a faith which will deliver him from the tyranny of his surroundings, widen his view of his own capabilities, make him conscious of belonging to a race which has rich things in store for the world, and glorify his heart with a thousand strange and fruitful sympathies, and with endless heroic aspirations.
Footnotes:
18 The Prose Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson; vol. i, p. 292.
18 The Prose Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson; vol. i, p. 292.
The Negro who is really restless on the subject of caste in America is he who, from defective culture or lack of culture, has not half found out the calling of his race; who, consequently, unduly impressed by his surroundings, is eager for immediate success, and anxious to play his part well amid the circumstances in which he finds himself—aiming at technical skill, which is popular or fashionable, rather than artistic life, which may be unique and unpopular. Fascinated by the present, he cannot conceive anything else, and harasses himself with the ever-recurring and ever-unsatisfying and unsatisfactory task of imitating imitators. The Negro, raised to Mr. Heywood’s standard, will feel the force of Emerson’s words:--
We like only such actions as have already long had the praise of men, and do not perceive that anything man can do may be divinely done. We think greatness entailed or organised in some places, or duties in certain offices or occasions, and do not see that Paganini can extract rapture from a catgut, and Eulenstein from a jew’s-harp, and a limber-fingered lad out of shreds of paper with his scissors, and Landseer out of swine, and the hero out of the pitiful habitation and company in which he was hidden. What we call obscure condition or vulgar society is that condition and society whose poetry is not yet written, but which you shall presently make as enviable and renowned as any.[19]
Recognising the force of these truths, the cultivated Negro will have insight enough to discover his exact relation to surrounding superficial phenomena, and self-respect and independence enough to acknowledge the fact that his peculiar work cannot be done under the overshadowing influence of a foreign race; that there he cannot “communicate himself to others in his full stature and proportion;” and, feeling this, he will turn to the fatherland, to “the one direction in which all space is open to him,” and under the conviction that “he has faculties inviting him thither to endless exertion.”
The teachers of the Negro in America cannot have failed to observe that there seems always to be in the mind of their pupils some reservation which they cannot overcome—some hesitancy which they cannot explain, but which they attribute to a sort of modesty growing out of a sense of inferiority in the pupil. But the fact is, that, under the influence of the means of culture to which he has access, his race-consciousness is kindled into active and sensitive life, and he receives, under mental protest, many a dogma, which for European, growth and development is orthodox and inspiring. Not only the physical and metaphysical teachings often puzzle and contradict his deepest feelings, but even the Scriptures are, at times, a perplexity to him; and as he becomes acquainted with the original languages in which they were written, he feels that there is in them a temporary and local element which must be separated from the permanent and universal, before the sacred records can utter what, in the depths of his being, he wants to say. But, in America, he will never be able to make the discrimination that will be useful to him. He will never be able to translate the letter, which is often adapted to another age and race, into the spirit of his own times and race. He is, therefore, lonely with his secret, with which nothing around him seems to sympathise. Development is denied him; he cannot expand. He fills his belly with theories and dogmas which to him are like the dry, hard husk. He cannot digest them, and they afford him no nourishment. Nearly everything he produces comes from the memory; very little flows fresh from the heart. The African Methodist Episcopal Church in the United States is the result, in part, of just such experiences on the part of the Bishop Aliens of a former day. They found that the waters flowing from the fountain which God had opéned in their soul were slackened and half-choked by being forced through the pent-up and artificial channels provided for them in the white Churches, and they established that noble organisation—the admiration of Negroes everywhere, which during the last fifty years has attained such wonderful growth— that the living streams of their unfettered nature might wind their own sweet way along the meadows of an ecclesiastical Liberia. If the fare with which they were furnished in the new religious Republic was ridiculed by their enemies as “ash cake,” it was to them more than the wheat bread upon which they were starved in their previous connection. The food now dispensed to them was to their souls the very bread of life.
We like only such actions as have already long had the praise of men, and do not perceive that anything man can do may be divinely done. We think greatness entailed or organised in some places, or duties in certain offices or occasions, and do not see that Paganini can extract rapture from a catgut, and Eulenstein from a jew’s-harp, and a limber-fingered lad out of shreds of paper with his scissors, and Landseer out of swine, and the hero out of the pitiful habitation and company in which he was hidden. What we call obscure condition or vulgar society is that condition and society whose poetry is not yet written, but which you shall presently make as enviable and renowned as any.[19]
Recognising the force of these truths, the cultivated Negro will have insight enough to discover his exact relation to surrounding superficial phenomena, and self-respect and independence enough to acknowledge the fact that his peculiar work cannot be done under the overshadowing influence of a foreign race; that there he cannot “communicate himself to others in his full stature and proportion;” and, feeling this, he will turn to the fatherland, to “the one direction in which all space is open to him,” and under the conviction that “he has faculties inviting him thither to endless exertion.”
The teachers of the Negro in America cannot have failed to observe that there seems always to be in the mind of their pupils some reservation which they cannot overcome—some hesitancy which they cannot explain, but which they attribute to a sort of modesty growing out of a sense of inferiority in the pupil. But the fact is, that, under the influence of the means of culture to which he has access, his race-consciousness is kindled into active and sensitive life, and he receives, under mental protest, many a dogma, which for European, growth and development is orthodox and inspiring. Not only the physical and metaphysical teachings often puzzle and contradict his deepest feelings, but even the Scriptures are, at times, a perplexity to him; and as he becomes acquainted with the original languages in which they were written, he feels that there is in them a temporary and local element which must be separated from the permanent and universal, before the sacred records can utter what, in the depths of his being, he wants to say. But, in America, he will never be able to make the discrimination that will be useful to him. He will never be able to translate the letter, which is often adapted to another age and race, into the spirit of his own times and race. He is, therefore, lonely with his secret, with which nothing around him seems to sympathise. Development is denied him; he cannot expand. He fills his belly with theories and dogmas which to him are like the dry, hard husk. He cannot digest them, and they afford him no nourishment. Nearly everything he produces comes from the memory; very little flows fresh from the heart. The African Methodist Episcopal Church in the United States is the result, in part, of just such experiences on the part of the Bishop Aliens of a former day. They found that the waters flowing from the fountain which God had opéned in their soul were slackened and half-choked by being forced through the pent-up and artificial channels provided for them in the white Churches, and they established that noble organisation—the admiration of Negroes everywhere, which during the last fifty years has attained such wonderful growth— that the living streams of their unfettered nature might wind their own sweet way along the meadows of an ecclesiastical Liberia. If the fare with which they were furnished in the new religious Republic was ridiculed by their enemies as “ash cake,” it was to them more than the wheat bread upon which they were starved in their previous connection. The food now dispensed to them was to their souls the very bread of life.
Footnotes:
19 Prose Works, vol. ii, p. 291.
19 Prose Works, vol. ii, p. 291.
But there are many drawbacks to this imperium in imperio. It grew out of a temporary and local necessity, and, like all such products, must be partial and limited in its influence. Does it not become this most honourable and useful body—this first-born of African Churches—this pledge and proof of Africa’s future evangelisation—to inquire whether they may not increase their efficiency and even develop their central strength by taking a wider, deeper, and more practical interest in the land of their fathers, in their kith and kin in Africa? Their system is capable of indefinite development in the vast and unoccupied field which this continent presents. The message to them, as a Church of Christ is, “Go ye into all the world”—not only over the United States, from California to New York and from New England to Texas, but to “regions beyond,” especially to the lost sheep of their own race. Their talents, it occurs to us, are not as useful and as profitable as they might be made. This is a drawback and a mistake. If it be sinful to wrap our talent in a napkin and hide it in the earth, it is only one degree less sinful so to handle it as to make it yield twofold only where it might yield ten. We are persuaded, however, that it is not the courage they lack for the work, but conviction. The same self-control and self-reliance, the same energy and independence, which led to the founding of the African Churches in the United States would readily, if there were earnest conviction on the subject, sacrifice the charms of home, the comforts of civilisation, the æsthetic and sensuous attractions of an enlightened country, for the labours and toils and privations of the wilderness. They are quite equal to, and have shown themselves worthy of, the great achievement of taking possession of the whole valley of the Niger for Christ. Let them arise and come, and they will find in the home of their widowed parent that “the barrel of meal will not waste, nor will the cruse of oil fail.” Freedom from restraint ought not to be our ultimate and final object, but FREEDOM TO WORSHIP GOD; and the desire for such freedom is, in certain aspects of the subject, among the happiest of the popular instincts of the Negro race.
It is remarkable that the message which Moses was commanded to bear to the tyrant Pharaoh was not “Let My people go that they may be free,” but “Let my people go that they may serve ME.” AS long as they remained in a strange country under a foreign race they could not render that service for which they were fitted, and which God requires of every man. They could not serve the Lord with their “whole heart,” the undiminished fulness of their nature, in carrying out the purposes of their being. “How could they sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?” Their race-impulses and instincts were hampered, confused and impaired. So with the Negro in America. Although their gatherings, of whatever nature, are usually marked and enlivened by a stream of religious feeling which continually flows with a rapid, and sometimes boisterous, current, still they cannot fully know God in that land, for they see him through the medium of others. Here and there there may be a “Caleb, who has another spirit within him, and follows the Lord fully:” but the masses are distracted by the disturbing media. The body, soul, and spirit do not work in harmony. The religious passions are predominant in their influences among them, and they show a co-operative and successful energy in ecclesiastical organisations; but, in their political struggles, there is no attempt at any logical or reasoned solution of their difficulties. “The Negro,” says Rev. Joseph Cook, “has gone to the wall in Mississippi, in spite of having a majority there and the suffrage. And he is likely to go to the wall in South Carolina. He is going to the wall even where he has a majority; and his inferiority in politics results from his lack of Education”—such an education as he can never receive in America. But let him be delivered from the restraints of his exile; let him be set free from the stocks that now confine him, and he will not only arise and walk, but he will point out the way to the eminent success, which, in his particular line, only he can find out, and which he must find out for himself. He will discover the central point from which the lines may be easily and infallibly drawn to all the points of the circle to which he is to move effectively, in the true work of his race, for his own elevation and the advantage of the rest of mankind. He will prove that what in African history and character seems nebulous confusion is really a firmament of stars. There are stars, astronomers tell us, whose light has not yet reached the earth; so there are stars in the moral universe yet to be disclosed by the unfettered African, which he must discover before he will be able to progress without wandering into perilous seas and suffering serious injury. Let him, then, return to the land of his fathers, and ACQUAINT HIMSELF WITH GOD, AND BE AT PEACE.
It is remarkable that the message which Moses was commanded to bear to the tyrant Pharaoh was not “Let My people go that they may be free,” but “Let my people go that they may serve ME.” AS long as they remained in a strange country under a foreign race they could not render that service for which they were fitted, and which God requires of every man. They could not serve the Lord with their “whole heart,” the undiminished fulness of their nature, in carrying out the purposes of their being. “How could they sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?” Their race-impulses and instincts were hampered, confused and impaired. So with the Negro in America. Although their gatherings, of whatever nature, are usually marked and enlivened by a stream of religious feeling which continually flows with a rapid, and sometimes boisterous, current, still they cannot fully know God in that land, for they see him through the medium of others. Here and there there may be a “Caleb, who has another spirit within him, and follows the Lord fully:” but the masses are distracted by the disturbing media. The body, soul, and spirit do not work in harmony. The religious passions are predominant in their influences among them, and they show a co-operative and successful energy in ecclesiastical organisations; but, in their political struggles, there is no attempt at any logical or reasoned solution of their difficulties. “The Negro,” says Rev. Joseph Cook, “has gone to the wall in Mississippi, in spite of having a majority there and the suffrage. And he is likely to go to the wall in South Carolina. He is going to the wall even where he has a majority; and his inferiority in politics results from his lack of Education”—such an education as he can never receive in America. But let him be delivered from the restraints of his exile; let him be set free from the stocks that now confine him, and he will not only arise and walk, but he will point out the way to the eminent success, which, in his particular line, only he can find out, and which he must find out for himself. He will discover the central point from which the lines may be easily and infallibly drawn to all the points of the circle to which he is to move effectively, in the true work of his race, for his own elevation and the advantage of the rest of mankind. He will prove that what in African history and character seems nebulous confusion is really a firmament of stars. There are stars, astronomers tell us, whose light has not yet reached the earth; so there are stars in the moral universe yet to be disclosed by the unfettered African, which he must discover before he will be able to progress without wandering into perilous seas and suffering serious injury. Let him, then, return to the land of his fathers, and ACQUAINT HIMSELF WITH GOD, AND BE AT PEACE.
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