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The Souls of Black Folk by W. E. B. Du Bois
To Burghardt and Yolande The Lost and the Found
The Forethought Herein lie buried many things which if read
with patience may show the strange meaning of being black here at the dawning of the
Twentieth Century. This meaning is not without interest to you,
Gentle Reader; for the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color line.
I pray you, then, receive my little book in all charity, studying my words with me, forgiving
mistake and foible for sake of the faith and passion that is in me, and seeking the grain
of truth hidden there. I have sought here to sketch, in vague, uncertain
outline, the spiritual world in which ten thousand thousand Americans live and strive.
First, in two chapters I have tried to show what Emancipation meant to them, and what
was its aftermath. In a third chapter I have pointed out the
slow rise of personal leadership, and criticized candidly the leader who bears the chief burden
of his race to-day. Then, in two other chapters I have sketched in swift outline the two worlds
within and without the Veil, and thus have come to the central problem of training men
for life. Venturing now into deeper detail, I have in
two chapters studied the struggles of the massed millions of the black peasantry, and
in another have sought to make clear the present relations of the sons of master and man.
Leaving, then, the white world, I have stepped within the Veil, raising it that you may view
faintly its deeper recesses,—the meaning of its religion, the passion of its human
sorrow, and the struggle of its greater souls. All this I have ended with a tale twice told
but seldom written, and a chapter of song. Some of these thoughts of mine have seen the
light before in other guise. For kindly consenting to their republication
here, in altered and extended form, I must thank the publishers of the Atlantic Monthly,
The World's Work, the Dial, The New World, and the Annals of the American Academy of
Political and Social Science. Before each chapter, as now printed, stands
a bar of the Sorrow Songs,—some echo of haunting melody from the only American music
which welled up from black souls in the dark past.
And, finally, need I add that I who speak here am bone of the bone and flesh of the
flesh of them that live within the Veil? W.E.B. Du Bois
Atlanta, Georgia, February 1, 1903.
Chapter I Of Our Spiritual Strivings
O water, voice of my heart, crying in the sand,
All night long crying with a mournful cry, As I lie and listen, and cannot understand
The voice of my heart in my side or the voice of the sea,
O water, crying for rest, is it I, is it I? All night long the water is crying to me.
Unresting water, there shall never be rest Till the last moon droop and the last tide
fail, And the fire of the end begin to burn in the
west; And the heart shall be weary and wonder and
cry like the sea, All life long crying without avail,
As the water all night long is crying to me.
Arthur Symons
Between me and the other world there is ever an unasked question: unasked by some through
feelings of delicacy; by others through the difficulty of rightly framing it.
All, nevertheless, flutter round it. They approach me in a half-hesitant sort of way,
eye me curiously or compassionately, and then, instead of saying directly, How does it feel
to be a problem? they say, I know an excellent colored man in my town; or, I fought at Mechanicsville;
or, Do not these Southern outrages make your blood boil?
At these I smile, or am interested, or reduce the boiling to a simmer, as the occasion may
require. To the real question, How does it feel to
be a problem? I answer seldom a word.
And yet, being a problem is a strange experience,—peculiar even for one who has never been anything else,
save perhaps in babyhood and in Europe. It is in the early days of rollicking boyhood
that the revelation first bursts upon one, all in a day, as it were.
I remember well when the shadow swept across me. I was a little thing, away up in the hills
of New England, where the dark Housatonic winds between Hoosac and Taghkanic to the
sea. In a wee wooden schoolhouse, something put
it into the boys' and girls' heads to buy gorgeous visiting-cards—ten cents a package—and
exchange. The exchange was merry, till one girl, a tall
newcomer, refused my card,—refused it peremptorily, with a glance.
Then it dawned upon me with a certain suddenness that I was different from the others; or like,
mayhap, in heart and life and longing, but shut out from their world by a vast veil.
I had thereafter no desire to tear down that veil, to creep through; I held all beyond
it in common contempt, and lived above it in a region of blue sky and great wandering
shadows. That sky was bluest when I could beat my mates
at examination-time, or beat them at a foot-race, or even beat their stringy heads.
Alas, with the years all this fine contempt began to fade; for the words I longed for,
and all their dazzling opportunities, were theirs, not mine.
But they should not keep these prizes, I said; some, all, I would wrest from them. Just how
I would do it I could never decide: by reading law, by healing the sick, by telling the wonderful
tales that swam in my head,—some way. With other black boys the strife was not so
fiercely sunny: their youth shrunk into tasteless sycophancy, or into silent hatred of the pale
world about them and mocking distrust of everything white; or wasted itself in a bitter cry, Why
did God make me an outcast and a stranger in mine own house?
The shades of the prison-house closed round about us all: walls strait and stubborn to
the whitest, but relentlessly narrow, tall, and unscalable to sons of night who must plod
darkly on in resignation, or beat unavailing palms against the stone, or steadily, half
hopelessly, watch the streak of blue above. After the Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and
Roman, the Teuton and Mongolian, the *** is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil,
and gifted with second-sight in this American world,—a world which yields him no true
self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other
world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness,
this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others, of measuring one's
soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.
One ever feels his twoness,—an American, a ***; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled
strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it
from being torn asunder. The history of the American *** is the history
of this strife,—this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better
and truer self. In this merging he wishes neither of the older
selves to be lost. He would not Africanize America, for America
has too much to teach the world and Africa. He would not bleach his *** soul in a flood
of white Americanism, for he knows that *** blood has a message for the world.
He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a *** and an American, without
being cursed and spit upon by his fellows, without having the doors of Opportunity closed
roughly in his face. This, then, is the end of his striving: to
be a co-worker in the kingdom of culture, to escape both death and isolation, to husband
and use his best powers and his latent genius. These powers of body and mind have in the
past been strangely wasted, dispersed, or forgotten. The shadow of a mighty *** past
flits through the tale of Ethiopia the Shadowy and of Egypt the Sphinx.
Through history, the powers of single black men flash here and there like falling stars,
and die sometimes before the world has rightly gauged their brightness.
Here in America, in the few days since Emancipation, the black man's turning hither and thither
in hesitant and doubtful striving has often made his very strength to lose effectiveness,
to seem like absence of power, like weakness. And yet it is not weakness,—it is the contradiction
of double aims. The double-aimed struggle of the black artisan—on
the one hand to escape white contempt for a nation of
mere hewers of wood and drawers of water, and on the other hand to plough and nail and
dig for a poverty-stricken horde—could only result in making him a poor craftsman, for
he had but half a heart in either cause. By the poverty and ignorance of his people,
the *** minister or doctor was tempted toward quackery and demagogy; and by the criticism
of the other world, toward ideals that made him ashamed of his lowly tasks.
The would-be black savant was confronted by the paradox that the knowledge his people
needed was a twice-told tale to his white neighbors, while the knowledge which would
teach the white world was Greek to his own flesh and blood.
The innate love of harmony and beauty that set the ruder souls of his people a-dancing
and a-singing raised but confusion and doubt in the soul of the black artist; for the beauty
revealed to him was the soul-beauty of a race which his larger audience despised, and he
could not articulate the message of another people.
This waste of double aims, this seeking to satisfy two unreconciled ideals, has wrought
sad havoc with the courage and faith and deeds of ten thousand thousand people,—has sent
them often wooing false gods and invoking false means of salvation, and at times has
even seemed about to make them ashamed of themselves.
Away back in the days of bondage they thought to see in one divine event the end of all
doubt and disappointment; few men ever worshipped Freedom with half such unquestioning faith
as did the American *** for two centuries. To him, so far as he thought and dreamed,
slavery was indeed the sum of all villainies, the cause of all sorrow, the root of all prejudice;
Emancipation was the key to a promised land of sweeter beauty than ever stretched before
the eyes of wearied Israelites. In song and exhortation swelled one refrain—Liberty;
in his tears and curses the God he implored had Freedom in his right hand. At last it
came,—suddenly, fearfully, like a dream. With one wild carnival of blood and passion
came the message in his own plaintive cadences:—
"Shout, O children! Shout, you're free!
For God has bought your liberty!" Years have passed away since then,—ten,
twenty, forty; forty years of national life, forty years of renewal and development, and
yet the swarthy spectre sits in its accustomed seat at the Nation's feast.
In vain do we cry to this our vastest social problem:—
"Take any shape but that, and my firm nerves Shall never tremble!"
The Nation has not yet found peace from its sins; the freedman has not yet found in freedom
his promised land. Whatever of good may have come in these years
of change, the shadow of a deep disappointment rests upon the *** people,—a disappointment
all the more bitter because the unattained ideal was unbounded save by the simple ignorance
of a lowly people. The first decade was merely a prolongation
of the vain search for freedom, the boon that seemed ever barely to elude their grasp,—like
a tantalizing will-o'-the-wisp, maddening and misleading the headless host.
The holocaust of war, the terrors of the Ku-Klux ***, the lies of carpet-baggers, the disorganization
of industry, and the contradictory advice of friends and foes, left the bewildered serf
with no new watchword beyond the old cry for freedom.
As the time flew, however, he began to grasp a new idea.
The ideal of liberty demanded for its attainment powerful means, and these the Fifteenth Amendment
gave him. The ballot, which before he had looked upon
as a visible sign of freedom, he now regarded as the chief means of gaining and perfecting
the liberty with which war had partially endowed him.
And why not? Had not votes made war and emancipated millions?
Had not votes enfranchised the freedmen? Was anything impossible to a power that had
done all this? A million black men started with renewed zeal
to vote themselves into the kingdom. So the decade flew away, the revolution of
1876 came, and left the half-free serf weary, wondering, but still inspired.
Slowly but steadily, in the following years, a new vision began gradually to replace the
dream of political power,—a powerful movement, the rise of another ideal to guide the unguided,
another pillar of fire by night after a clouded day.
It was the ideal of "book-learning"; the curiosity, born of compulsory ignorance, to know and
test the power of the cabalistic letters of the white man, the longing to know.
Here at last seemed to have been discovered the mountain path to Canaan; longer than the
highway of Emancipation and law, steep and rugged, but straight, leading to heights high
enough to overlook life. Up the new path the advance guard toiled,
slowly, heavily, doggedly; only those who have watched and guided the faltering feet,
the misty minds, the dull understandings, of the dark pupils of these schools know how
faithfully, how piteously, this people strove to learn.
It was weary work. The cold statistician wrote down the inches
of progress here and there, noted also where here and there a foot had slipped or some
one had fallen. To the tired climbers, the horizon was ever
dark, the mists were often cold, the Canaan was always dim and far away.
If, however, the vistas disclosed as yet no goal, no resting-place, little but flattery
and criticism, the journey at least gave leisure for reflection and self-examination; it changed
the child of Emancipation to the youth with dawning self-consciousness, self-realization,
self-respect. In those sombre forests of his striving his
own soul rose before him, and he saw himself,—darkly as through a veil; and yet he saw in himself
some faint revelation of his power, of his mission.
He began to have a dim feeling that, to attain his place in the world, he must be himself,
and not another. For the first time he sought to analyze the
burden he bore upon his back, that dead-weight of social degradation partially masked behind
a half-named *** problem. He felt his poverty; without a cent, without
a home, without land, tools, or savings, he had entered into competition with rich, landed,
skilled neighbors. To be a poor man is hard, but to be a poor
race in a land of dollars is the very bottom of hardships.
He felt the weight of his ignorance,—not simply of letters, but of life, of business,
of the humanities; the accumulated sloth and shirking and awkwardness of decades and centuries
shackled his hands and feet. Nor was his burden all poverty and ignorance.
The red stain of bastardy, which two centuries of systematic legal defilement of *** women
had stamped upon his race, meant not only the loss of ancient African chastity, but
also the hereditary weight of a mass of corruption from white adulterers, threatening almost
the obliteration of the *** home. A people thus handicapped ought not to be
asked to race with the world, but rather allowed to give all its time and thought to its own
social problems. But alas! while sociologists gleefully count
his *** and his prostitutes, the very soul of the toiling, sweating black man is
darkened by the shadow of a vast despair. Men call the shadow prejudice, and learnedly
explain it as the natural defence of culture against barbarism, learning against ignorance,
purity against crime, the "higher" against the "lower" races.
To which the *** cries Amen! and swears that to so much of this strange prejudice
as is founded on just homage to civilization, culture, righteousness, and progress, he humbly
bows and meekly does obeisance. But before that nameless prejudice that leaps
beyond all this he stands helpless, dismayed, and well-nigh speechless; before that personal
disrespect and mockery, the ridicule and systematic humiliation, the distortion of fact and wanton
license of fancy, the cynical ignoring of the better and the boisterous welcoming of
the worse, the all-pervading desire to inculcate disdain for everything black, from Toussaint
to the devil,—before this there rises a sickening despair that would disarm and discourage
any nation save that black host to whom "discouragement" is an unwritten word.
But the facing of so vast a prejudice could not but bring the inevitable self-questioning,
self-disparagement, and lowering of ideals which ever accompany repression and breed
in an atmosphere of contempt and hate. Whisperings and portents came home upon the
four winds: Lo! we are diseased and dying, cried the dark hosts; we cannot write, our
voting is vain; what need of education, since we must always cook and serve?
And the Nation echoed and enforced this self-criticism, saying: Be content to be servants, and nothing
more; what need of higher culture for half-men? Away with the black man's ballot, by force
or fraud,—and behold the suicide of a race! Nevertheless, out of the evil came something
of good,—the more careful adjustment of education to real life, the clearer perception
of the Negroes' social responsibilities, and the sobering realization of the meaning of
progress. So dawned the time of Sturm und Drang: storm
and stress to-day rocks our little boat on the mad waters of the world-sea; there is
within and without the sound of conflict, the burning of body and rending of soul; inspiration
strives with doubt, and faith with vain questionings. The bright ideals of the past,—physical
freedom, political power, the training of brains and the training of hands,—all these
in turn have waxed and waned, until even the last grows dim and overcast.
Are they all wrong,—all false? No, not that, but each alone was over-simple
and incomplete,—the dreams of a credulous race-childhood, or the fond imaginings of
the other world which does not know and does not want to know our power.
To be really true, all these ideals must be melted and welded into one.
The training of the schools we need to-day more than ever,—the training of deft hands,
quick eyes and ears, and above all the broader, deeper, higher culture of gifted minds and
pure hearts. The power of the ballot we need in sheer self-defence,—else what shall save
us from a second slavery? Freedom, too, the long-sought, we still seek,—the
freedom of life and limb, the freedom to work and think, the freedom to love and aspire.
Work, culture, liberty,—all these we need, not singly but together, not successively
but together, each growing and aiding each, and all striving toward that vaster ideal
that swims before the *** people, the ideal of human brotherhood, gained through the unifying
ideal of Race; the ideal of fostering and developing the traits and talents of the ***,
not in opposition to or contempt for other races, but rather in large conformity to the
greater ideals of the American Republic, in order that some day on American soil two world-races
may give each to each those characteristics both so sadly lack.
We the darker ones come even now not altogether empty-handed: there are to-day no truer exponents
of the pure human spirit of the Declaration of Independence than the American Negroes;
there is no true American music but the wild sweet melodies of the *** slave; the American
fairy tales and folklore are Indian and African; and, all in all, we black men seem the sole
oasis of simple faith and reverence in a dusty desert of dollars and smartness.
Will America be poorer if she replace her brutal dyspeptic blundering with light-hearted
but determined *** humility? or her coarse and cruel wit with loving jovial good-humor?
or her vulgar music with the soul of the Sorrow Songs?
Merely a concrete test of the underlying principles of the great republic is the *** Problem,
and the spiritual striving of the freedmen's sons is the travail of souls whose burden
is almost beyond the measure of their strength, but who bear it in the name of an historic
race, in the name of this the land of their fathers' fathers, and in the name of human
opportunity. And now what I have briefly sketched in large
outline let me on coming pages tell again in many ways, with loving emphasis and deeper
detail, that men may listen to the striving in the souls of black folk.
End of Chapter I
Chapter II Of the Dawn of Freedom
Careless seems the great Avenger;
History's lessons but record One death-grapple in the darkness
'Twixt old systems and the Word; Truth forever on the scaffold,
Wrong forever on the throne; Yet that scaffold sways the future,
And behind the dim unknown Standeth God within the shadow
Keeping watch above His own.
LOWELL. The problem of the twentieth century is the
problem of the color-line,—the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men
in Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of the sea.
It was a phase of this problem that caused the Civil War; and however much they who marched
South and North in 1861 may have fixed on the technical points, of union and local autonomy
as a shibboleth, all nevertheless knew, as we know, that the question of *** slavery
was the real cause of the conflict. Curious it was, too, how this deeper question
ever forced itself to the surface despite effort and disclaimer.
No sooner had Northern armies touched Southern soil than this old question, newly guised,
sprang from the earth,—What shall be done with Negroes? Peremptory military commands
this way and that, could not answer the query; the Emancipation Proclamation seemed but to
broaden and intensify the difficulties; and the War Amendments made the *** problems
of to-day. It is the aim of this essay to study the period
of history from 1861 to 1872 so far as it relates to the American ***.
In effect, this tale of the dawn of Freedom is an account of that government of men called
the Freedmen's Bureau,—one of the most singular and interesting of the attempts made by a
great nation to grapple with vast problems of race and social condition.
The war has naught to do with slaves, cried Congress, the President, and the Nation; and
yet no sooner had the armies, East and West, penetrated Virginia and Tennessee than fugitive
slaves appeared within their lines. They came at night, when the flickering camp-fires
shone like vast unsteady stars along the black horizon: old men and thin, with gray and tufted
hair; women with frightened eyes, dragging whimpering hungry children; men and girls,
stalwart and gaunt,—a horde of starving vagabonds, homeless, helpless, and pitiable,
in their dark distress. Two methods of treating these newcomers seemed
equally logical to opposite sorts of minds. Ben Butler, in Virginia, quickly declared
slave property contraband of war, and put the fugitives to work; while Fremont, in Missouri,
declared the slaves free under martial law. Butler's action was approved, but Fremont's
was hastily countermanded, and his successor, Halleck, saw things differently. "Hereafter,"
he commanded, "no slaves should be allowed to come into your lines at all; if any come
without your knowledge, when owners call for them deliver them."
Such a policy was difficult to enforce; some of the black refugees declared themselves
freemen, others showed that their masters had deserted them, and still others were captured
with forts and plantations. Evidently, too, slaves were a source of strength
to the Confederacy, and were being used as laborers and producers.
"They constitute a military resource," wrote Secretary Cameron, late in 1861; "and being
such, that they should not be turned over to the enemy is too plain to discuss."
So gradually the tone of the army chiefs changed; Congress forbade the rendition of fugitives,
and Butler's "contrabands" were welcomed as military laborers.
This complicated rather than solved the problem, for now the scattering fugitives became a
steady stream, which flowed faster as the armies marched.
Then the long-headed man with care-chiselled face who sat in the White House saw the inevitable,
and emancipated the slaves of rebels on New Year's, 1863.
A month later Congress called earnestly for the *** soldiers whom the act of July, 1862,
had half grudgingly allowed to enlist. Thus the barriers were levelled and the deed
was done. The stream of fugitives swelled to a flood,
and anxious army officers kept inquiring: "What must be done with slaves, arriving almost
daily? Are we to find food and shelter for women
and children?" It was a Pierce of Boston who pointed out
the way, and thus became in a sense the founder of the Freedmen's Bureau.
He was a firm friend of Secretary Chase; and when, in 1861, the care of slaves and abandoned
lands devolved upon the Treasury officials, Pierce was specially detailed from the ranks
to study the conditions. First, he cared for the refugees at Fortress
Monroe; and then, after Sherman had captured Hilton Head, Pierce was sent there to found
his Port Royal experiment of making free workingmen out of slaves.
Before his experiment was barely started, however, the problem of the fugitives had
assumed such proportions that it was taken from the hands of the over-burdened Treasury
Department and given to the army officials. Already centres of massed freedmen were forming
at Fortress Monroe, Washington, New Orleans, Vicksburg and Corinth, Columbus, Ky., and
Cairo, Ill., as well as at Port Royal. Army chaplains found here new and fruitful
fields; "superintendents of contrabands" multiplied, and some attempt at systematic work was made
by enlisting the able-bodied men and giving work to the others.
Then came the Freedmen's Aid societies, born of the touching appeals from Pierce and from
these other centres of distress. There was the American Missionary Association,
sprung from the Amistad, and now full-grown for work; the various church organizations,
the National Freedmen's Relief Association, the American Freedmen's Union, the Western
Freedmen's Aid Commission,—in all fifty or more active organizations, which sent clothes,
money, school-books, and teachers southward. All they did was needed, for the destitution
of the freedmen was often reported as "too appalling for belief," and the situation was
daily growing worse rather than better. And daily, too, it seemed more plain that
this was no ordinary matter of temporary relief, but a national crisis; for here loomed a labor
problem of vast dimensions. Masses of Negroes stood idle, or, if they
worked spasmodically, were never sure of pay; and if perchance they received pay, squandered
the new thing thoughtlessly. In these and other ways were camp-life and
the new liberty demoralizing the freedmen. The broader economic organization thus clearly
demanded sprang up here and there as accident and local conditions determined. Here it was
that Pierce's Port Royal plan of leased plantations and guided workmen pointed out the rough way.
In Washington the military governor, at the urgent appeal of the superintendent, opened
confiscated estates to the cultivation of the fugitives, and there in the shadow of
the dome gathered black farm villages. General Dix gave over estates to the freedmen
of Fortress Monroe, and so on, South and West. The government and benevolent societies furnished
the means of cultivation, and the *** turned again slowly to work.
The systems of control, thus started, rapidly grew, here and there, into strange little
governments, like that of General Banks in Louisiana, with its ninety thousand black
subjects, its fifty thousand guided laborers, and its annual budget of one hundred thousand
dollars and more. It made out four thousand pay-rolls a year,
registered all freedmen, inquired into grievances and redressed them, laid and collected taxes,
and established a system of public schools. So, too, Colonel Eaton, the superintendent
of Tennessee and Arkansas, ruled over one hundred thousand freedmen, leased and cultivated
seven thousand acres of cotton land, and fed ten thousand paupers a year.
In South Carolina was General Saxton, with his deep interest in black folk.
He succeeded Pierce and the Treasury officials, and sold forfeited estates, leased abandoned
plantations, encouraged schools, and received from Sherman, after that terribly picturesque
march to the sea, thousands of the wretched camp followers.
Three characteristic things one might have seen in Sherman's raid through Georgia, which
threw the new situation in shadowy relief: the Conqueror, the Conquered, and the ***.
Some see all significance in the grim front of the destroyer, and some in the bitter sufferers
of the Lost Cause. But to me neither soldier nor fugitive speaks
with so deep a meaning as that dark human cloud that clung like remorse on the rear
of those swift columns, swelling at times to half their size, almost engulfing and choking
them. In vain were they ordered back, in vain were
bridges hewn from beneath their feet; on they trudged and writhed and surged, until they
rolled into Savannah, a starved and naked horde of tens of thousands.
There too came the characteristic military remedy: "The islands from Charleston south,
the abandoned rice-fields along the rivers for thirty miles back from the sea, and the
country bordering the St. John's River, Florida, are reserved and set apart for the settlement
of Negroes now made free by act of war." So read the celebrated "Field-order Number Fifteen."
All these experiments, orders, and systems were bound to attract and perplex the government
and the nation. Directly after the Emancipation Proclamation,
Representative Eliot had introduced a bill creating a Bureau of Emancipation; but it
was never reported. The following June a committee of inquiry,
appointed by the Secretary of War, reported in favor of a temporary bureau for the "improvement,
protection, and employment of refugee freedmen," on much the same lines as were afterwards
followed. Petitions came in to President Lincoln from
distinguished citizens and organizations, strongly urging a comprehensive and unified
plan of dealing with the freedmen, under a bureau which should be "charged with the study
of plans and execution of measures for easily guiding, and in every way judiciously and
humanely aiding, the passage of our emancipated and yet to be emancipated blacks from the
old condition of forced labor to their new state of voluntary industry."
Some half-hearted steps were taken to accomplish this, in part, by putting the whole matter
again in charge of the special Treasury agents. Laws of 1863 and 1864 directed them to take
charge of and lease abandoned lands for periods not exceeding twelve months, and to "provide
in such leases, or otherwise, for the employment and general welfare" of the freedmen.
Most of the army officers greeted this as a welcome relief from perplexing "*** affairs,"
and Secretary Fessenden, July 29, 1864, issued an excellent system of regulations, which
were afterward closely followed by General Howard.
Under Treasury agents, large quantities of land were leased in the Mississippi Valley,
and many Negroes were employed; but in August, 1864, the new regulations were suspended for
reasons of "public policy," and the army was again in control.
Meanwhile Congress had turned its attention to the subject; and in March the House passed
a bill by a majority of two establishing a Bureau for Freedmen in the War Department.
Charles Sumner, who had charge of the bill in the Senate, argued that freedmen and abandoned
lands ought to be under the same department, and reported a substitute for the House bill
attaching the Bureau to the Treasury Department. This bill passed, but too late for action
by the House. The debates wandered over the whole policy
of the administration and the general question of slavery, without touching very closely
the specific merits of the measure in hand. Then the national election took place; and
the administration, with a vote of renewed confidence from the country, addressed itself
to the matter more seriously. A conference between the two branches of Congress
agreed upon a carefully drawn measure which contained the chief provisions of Sumner's
bill, but made the proposed organization a department independent of both the War and
the Treasury officials. The bill was conservative, giving the new
department "general superintendence of all freedmen."
Its purpose was to "establish regulations" for them, protect them, lease them lands,
adjust their wages, and appear in civil and military courts as their "next friend." There
were many limitations attached to the powers thus granted, and the organization was made
permanent. Nevertheless, the Senate defeated the bill,
and a new conference committee was appointed. This committee reported a new bill, February
28, which was whirled through just as the session closed, and became the act of 1865
establishing in the War Department a "Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands."
This last compromise was a hasty bit of legislation, vague and uncertain in outline.
A Bureau was created, "to continue during the present War of Rebellion, and for one
year thereafter," to which was given "the supervision and management of all abandoned
lands and the control of all subjects relating to refugees and freedmen," under "such rules
and regulations as may be presented by the head of the Bureau and approved by the President."
A Commissioner, appointed by the President and Senate, was to control the Bureau, with
an office force not exceeding ten clerks. The President might also appoint assistant
commissioners in the seceded States, and to all these offices military officials might
be detailed at regular pay. The Secretary of War could issue rations,
clothing, and fuel to the destitute, and all abandoned property was placed in the hands
of the Bureau for eventual lease and sale to ex-slaves in forty-acre parcels.
Thus did the United States government definitely assume charge of the emancipated *** as
the ward of the nation. It was a tremendous undertaking.
Here at a stroke of the pen was erected a government of millions of men,—and not ordinary
men either, but black men emasculated by a peculiarly complete system of slavery, centuries
old; and now, suddenly, violently, they come into a new birthright, at a time of war and
passion, in the midst of the stricken and embittered population of their former masters.
Any man might well have hesitated to assume charge of such a work, with vast responsibilities,
indefinite powers, and limited resources. Probably no one but a soldier would have answered
such a call promptly; and, indeed, no one but a soldier could be called, for Congress
had appropriated no money for salaries and expenses.
Less than a month after the weary Emancipator passed to his rest, his successor assigned
Major-Gen. Oliver O. Howard to duty as Commissioner of the new Bureau.
He was a Maine man, then only thirty-five years of age.
He had marched with Sherman to the sea, had fought well at Gettysburg, and but the year
before had been assigned to the command of the Department of Tennessee.
An honest man, with too much faith in human nature, little aptitude for business and intricate
detail, he had had large opportunity of becoming acquainted at first hand with much of the
work before him. And of that work it has been truly said that
"no approximately correct history of civilization can ever be written which does not throw out
in bold relief, as one of the great landmarks of political and social progress, the organization
and administration of the Freedmen's Bureau." On May 12, 1865, Howard was appointed; and
he assumed the duties of his office promptly on the 15th, and began examining the field
of work. A curious mess he looked upon: little despotisms,
communistic experiments, slavery, peonage, business speculations, organized charity,
unorganized almsgiving,—all reeling on under the guise of helping the freedmen, and all
enshrined in the smoke and blood of the war and the cursing and silence of angry men.
On May 19 the new government—for a government it really was—issued its constitution; commissioners
were to be appointed in each of the seceded states, who were to take charge of "all subjects
relating to refugees and freedmen," and all relief and rations were to be given by their
consent alone. The Bureau invited continued cooperation with
benevolent societies, and declared: "It will be the object of all commissioners to introduce
practicable systems of compensated labor," and to establish schools.
Forthwith nine assistant commissioners were appointed.
They were to hasten to their fields of work; seek gradually to close relief establishments,
and make the destitute self-supporting; act as courts of law where there were no courts,
or where Negroes were not recognized in them as free; establish the institution of marriage
among ex-slaves, and keep records; see that freedmen were free to choose their employers,
and help in making fair contracts for them; and finally, the circular said: "Simple good
faith, for which we hope on all hands for those concerned in the passing away of slavery,
will especially relieve the assistant commissioners in the discharge of their duties toward the
freedmen, as well as promote the general welfare." No sooner was the work thus started, and the
general system and local organization in some measure begun, than two grave difficulties
appeared which changed largely the theory and outcome of Bureau work. First, there were
the abandoned lands of the South. It had long been the more or less definitely
expressed theory of the North that all the chief problems of Emancipation might be settled
by establishing the slaves on the forfeited lands of their masters,—a sort of poetic
justice, said some. But this poetry done into solemn prose meant
either wholesale confiscation of private property in the South, or vast appropriations.
Now Congress had not appropriated a cent, and no sooner did the proclamations of general
amnesty appear than the eight hundred thousand acres of abandoned lands in the hands of the
Freedmen's Bureau melted quickly away. The second difficulty lay in perfecting the
local organization of the Bureau throughout the wide field of work.
Making a new machine and sending out officials of duly ascertained fitness for a great work
of social reform is no child's task; but this task was even harder, for a new central organization
had to be fitted on a heterogeneous and confused but already existing system of relief and
control of ex-slaves; and the agents available for this work must be sought for in an army
still busy with war operations,—men in the very nature of the case ill fitted for delicate
social work,—or among the questionable camp followers of an invading host.
Thus, after a year's work, vigorously as it was pushed, the problem looked even more difficult
to grasp and solve than at the beginning. Nevertheless, three things that year's work
did, well worth the doing: it relieved a vast amount of physical suffering; it transported
seven thousand fugitives from congested centres back to the farm; and, best of all, it inaugurated
the crusade of the New England schoolma'am. The annals of this Ninth Crusade are yet to
be written,—the tale of a mission that seemed to our age far more quixotic than the quest
of St. Louis seemed to his. Behind the mists of ruin and rapine waved
the calico dresses of women who dared, and after the hoarse mouthings of the field guns
rang the rhythm of the alphabet. Rich and poor they were, serious and curious.
Bereaved now of a father, now of a brother, now of more than these, they came seeking
a life work in planting New England schoolhouses among the white and black of the South.
They did their work well. In that first year they taught one hundred
thousand souls, and more. Evidently, Congress must soon legislate again
on the hastily organized Bureau, which had so quickly grown into wide significance and
vast possibilities. An institution such as that was well-nigh
as difficult to end as to begin. Early in 1866 Congress took up the matter,
when Senator Trumbull, of Illinois, introduced a bill to extend the Bureau and enlarge its
powers. This measure received, at the hands of Congress,
far more thorough discussion and attention than its predecessor.
The war cloud had thinned enough to allow a clearer conception of the work of Emancipation.
The champions of the bill argued that the strengthening of the Freedmen's Bureau was
still a military necessity; that it was needed for the proper carrying out of the Thirteenth
Amendment, and was a work of sheer justice to the ex-slave, at a trifling cost to the
government. The opponents of the measure declared that
the war was over, and the necessity for war measures past; that the Bureau, by reason
of its extraordinary powers, was clearly unconstitutional in time of peace, and was destined to irritate
the South and pauperize the freedmen, at a final cost of possibly hundreds of millions.
These two arguments were unanswered, and indeed unanswerable: the one that the extraordinary
powers of the Bureau threatened the civil rights of all citizens; and the other that
the government must have power to do what manifestly must be done, and that present
abandonment of the freedmen meant their practical reenslavement.
The bill which finally passed enlarged and made permanent the Freedmen's Bureau.
It was promptly vetoed by President Johnson as "unconstitutional," "unnecessary," and
"extrajudicial," and failed of passage over the veto.
Meantime, however, the breach between Congress and the President began to broaden, and a
modified form of the lost bill was finally passed over the President's second veto, July
16. The act of 1866 gave the Freedmen's Bureau
its final form,—the form by which it will be known to posterity and judged of men.
It extended the existence of the Bureau to July, 1868; it authorized additional assistant
commissioners, the retention of army officers mustered out of regular service, the sale
of certain forfeited lands to freedmen on nominal terms, the sale of Confederate public
property for *** schools, and a wider field of judicial interpretation and cognizance.
The government of the unreconstructed South was thus put very largely in the hands of
the Freedmen's Bureau, especially as in many cases the departmental military commander
was now made also assistant commissioner. It was thus that the Freedmen's Bureau became
a full-fledged government of men. It made laws, executed them and interpreted
them; it laid and collected taxes, defined and punished crime, maintained and used military
force, and dictated such measures as it thought necessary and proper for the accomplishment
of its varied ends. Naturally, all these powers were not exercised
continuously nor to their fullest extent; and yet, as General Howard has said, "scarcely
any subject that has to be legislated upon in civil society failed, at one time or another,
to demand the action of this singular Bureau." To understand and criticise intelligently
so vast a work, one must not forget an instant the drift of things in the later sixties.
Lee had surrendered, Lincoln was dead, and Johnson and Congress were at loggerheads;
the Thirteenth Amendment was adopted, the Fourteenth pending, and the Fifteenth declared
in force in 1870. Guerrilla raiding, the ever-present flickering
after-flame of war, was spending its forces against the Negroes, and all the Southern
land was awakening as from some wild dream to poverty and social revolution.
In a time of perfect calm, amid willing neighbors and streaming wealth, the social uplifting
of four million slaves to an assured and self-sustaining place in the body politic and economic would
have been a herculean task; but when to the inherent difficulties of so delicate and nice
a social operation were added the spite and hate of conflict, the hell of war; when suspicion
and cruelty were rife, and gaunt Hunger wept beside Bereavement,—in such a case, the
work of any instrument of social regeneration was in large part foredoomed to failure.
The very name of the Bureau stood for a thing in the South which for two centuries and better
men had refused even to argue,—that life amid free Negroes was simply unthinkable,
the maddest of experiments. The agents that the Bureau could command varied
all the way from unselfish philanthropists to narrow-minded busybodies and thieves; and
even though it be true that the average was far better than the worst, it was the occasional
fly that helped spoil the ointment. Then amid all crouched the freed slave, bewildered
between friend and foe. He had emerged from slavery,—not the worst
slavery in the world, not a slavery that made all life unbearable, rather a slavery that
had here and there something of kindliness, fidelity, and happiness,—but withal slavery,
which, so far as human aspiration and desert were concerned, classed the black man and
the ox together. And the *** knew full well that, whatever
their deeper convictions may have been, Southern men had fought with desperate energy to perpetuate
this slavery under which the black masses, with half-articulate thought, had writhed
and shivered. They welcomed freedom with a cry.
They shrank from the master who still strove for their chains; they fled to the friends
that had freed them, even though those friends stood ready to use them as a club for driving
the recalcitrant South back into loyalty. So the cleft between the white and black South
grew. Idle to say it never should have been; it
was as inevitable as its results were pitiable. Curiously incongruous elements were left arrayed
against each other,—the North, the government, the carpet-bagger, and the slave, here; and
there, all the South that was white, whether gentleman or vagabond, honest man or rascal,
lawless murderer or martyr to duty. Thus it is doubly difficult to write of this
period calmly, so intense was the feeling, so mighty the human passions that swayed and
blinded men. Amid it all, two figures ever stand to typify
that day to coming ages,—the one, a gray-haired gentleman, whose fathers had quit themselves
like men, whose sons lay in nameless graves; who bowed to the evil of slavery because its
abolition threatened untold ill to all; who stood at last, in the evening of life, a blighted,
ruined form, with hate in his eyes;—and the other, a form hovering dark and mother-like,
her awful face black with the mists of centuries, had aforetime quailed at that white master's
command, had bent in love over the cradles of his sons and daughters, and closed in death
the sunken eyes of his wife,—aye, too, at his behest had laid herself low to his ***,
and borne a tawny man-child to the world, only to see her dark boy's limbs scattered
to the winds by midnight marauders riding after "damned ***."
These were the saddest sights of that woful day; and no man clasped the hands of these
two passing figures of the present-past; but, hating, they went to their long home, and,
hating, their children's children live today. Here, then, was the field of work for the
Freedmen's Bureau; and since, with some hesitation, it was continued by the act of 1868 until
1869, let us look upon four years of its work as a whole.
There were, in 1868, nine hundred Bureau officials scattered from Washington to Texas, ruling,
directly and indirectly, many millions of men.
The deeds of these rulers fall mainly under seven heads: the relief of physical suffering,
the overseeing of the beginnings of free labor, the buying and selling of land, the establishment
of schools, the paying of bounties, the administration of justice, and the financiering of all these
activities. Up to June, 1869, over half a million patients
had been treated by Bureau physicians and surgeons, and sixty hospitals and asylums
had been in operation. In fifty months twenty-one million free rations
were distributed at a cost of over four million dollars.
Next came the difficult question of labor. First, thirty thousand black men were transported
from the refuges and relief stations back to the farms, back to the critical trial of
a new way of working. Plain instructions went out from Washington:
the laborers must be free to choose their employers, no fixed rate of wages was prescribed,
and there was to be no peonage or forced labor. So far, so good; but where local agents differed
toto caelo in capacity and character, where the personnel was continually changing, the
outcome was necessarily varied. The largest element of success lay in the
fact that the majority of the freedmen were willing, even eager, to work.
So labor contracts were written,—fifty thousand in a single State,—laborers advised, wages
guaranteed, and employers supplied. In truth, the organization became a vast labor
bureau,—not perfect, indeed, notably defective here and there, but on the whole successful
beyond the dreams of thoughtful men. The two great obstacles which confronted the officials
were the tyrant and the idler,—the slaveholder who was determined to perpetuate slavery under
another name; and, the freedman who regarded freedom as perpetual rest,—the Devil and
the Deep Sea. In the work of establishing the Negroes as
peasant proprietors, the Bureau was from the first handicapped and at last absolutely checked.
Something was done, and larger things were planned; abandoned lands were leased so long
as they remained in the hands of the Bureau, and a total revenue of nearly half a million
dollars derived from black tenants. Some other lands to which the nation had gained
title were sold on easy terms, and public lands were opened for settlement to the very
few freedmen who had tools and capital. But the vision of "forty acres and a mule"—the
righteous and reasonable ambition to become a landholder, which the nation had all but
categorically promised the freedmen—was destined in most cases to bitter disappointment.
And those men of marvellous hindsight who are today seeking to preach the *** back
to the present peonage of the soil know well, or ought to know, that the opportunity of
binding the *** peasant willingly to the soil was lost on that day when the Commissioner
of the Freedmen's Bureau had to go to South Carolina and tell the weeping freedmen, after
their years of toil, that their land was not theirs, that there was a mistake—somewhere.
If by 1874 the Georgia *** alone owned three hundred and fifty thousand acres of land,
it was by grace of his thrift rather than by bounty of the government.
The greatest success of the Freedmen's Bureau lay in the planting of the free school among
Negroes, and the idea of free elementary education among all classes in the South.
It not only called the school-mistresses through the benevolent agencies and built them schoolhouses,
but it helped discover and support such apostles of human culture as Edmund Ware, Samuel Armstrong,
and Erastus Cravath. The opposition to *** education in the South
was at first bitter, and showed itself in ashes, insult, and blood; for the South believed
an educated *** to be a dangerous ***. And the South was not wholly wrong; for education
among all kinds of men always has had, and always will have, an element of danger and
revolution, of dissatisfaction and discontent. Nevertheless, men strive to know.
Perhaps some inkling of this paradox, even in the unquiet days of the Bureau, helped
the bayonets allay an opposition to human training which still to-day lies smouldering
in the South, but not flaming. Fisk, Atlanta, Howard, and Hampton were founded
in these days, and six million dollars were expended for educational work, seven hundred
and fifty thousand dollars of which the freedmen themselves gave of their poverty.
Such contributions, together with the buying of land and various other enterprises, showed
that the ex-slave was handling some free capital already.
The chief initial source of this was labor in the army, and his pay and bounty as a soldier.
Payments to *** soldiers were at first complicated by the ignorance of the recipients, and the
fact that the quotas of colored regiments from Northern States were largely filled by
recruits from the South, unknown to their fellow soldiers. Consequently, payments were
accompanied by such frauds that Congress, by joint resolution in 1867, put the whole
matter in the hands of the Freedmen's Bureau. In two years six million dollars was thus
distributed to five thousand claimants, and in the end the sum exceeded eight million
dollars. Even in this system fraud was frequent; but
still the work put needed capital in the hands of practical paupers, and some, at least,
was well spent. The most perplexing and least successful part
of the Bureau's work lay in the exercise of its judicial functions.
The regular Bureau court consisted of one representative of the employer, one of the
***, and one of the Bureau. If the Bureau could have maintained a perfectly
judicial attitude, this arrangement would have been ideal, and must in time have gained
confidence; but the nature of its other activities and the character of its personnel prejudiced
the Bureau in favor of the black litigants, and led without doubt to much injustice and
annoyance. On the other hand, to leave the *** in the hands of Southern courts was
impossible. In a distracted land where slavery had hardly
fallen, to keep the strong from wanton abuse of the weak, and the weak from gloating insolently
over the half-shorn strength of the strong, was a thankless, hopeless task.
The former masters of the land were peremptorily ordered about, seized, and imprisoned, and
punished over and again, with scant courtesy from army officers.
The former slaves were intimidated, beaten, ***, and butchered by angry and revengeful
men. Bureau courts tended to become centres simply
for punishing whites, while the regular civil courts tended to become solely institutions
for perpetuating the slavery of blacks. Almost every law and method ingenuity could
devise was employed by the legislatures to reduce the Negroes to serfdom,—to make them
the slaves of the State, if not of individual owners; while the Bureau officials too often
were found striving to put the "bottom rail on top," and gave the freedmen a power and
independence which they could not yet use. It is all well enough for us of another generation
to wax wise with advice to those who bore the burden in the heat of the day.
It is full easy now to see that the man who lost home, fortune, and family at a stroke,
and saw his land ruled by "mules and ***," was really benefited by the passing of slavery.
It is not difficult now to say to the young freedman, cheated and cuffed about who has
seen his father's head beaten to a jelly and his own mother namelessly assaulted, that
the meek shall inherit the earth. Above all, nothing is more convenient than
to heap on the Freedmen's Bureau all the evils of that evil day, and damn it utterly for
every mistake and blunder that was made. All this is easy, but it is neither sensible
nor just. Someone had blundered, but that was long before
Oliver Howard was born; there was criminal aggression and heedless neglect, but without
some system of control there would have been far more than there was.
Had that control been from within, the *** would have been re-enslaved, to all intents
and purposes. Coming as the control did from without, perfect
men and methods would have bettered all things; and even with imperfect agents and questionable
methods, the work accomplished was not undeserving of commendation.
Such was the dawn of Freedom; such was the work of the Freedmen's Bureau, which, summed
up in brief, may be epitomized thus: for some fifteen million dollars, beside the sums spent
before 1865, and the dole of benevolent societies, this Bureau set going a system of free labor,
established a beginning of peasant proprietorship, secured the recognition of black freedmen
before courts of law, and founded the free common school in the South.
On the other hand, it failed to begin the establishment of good-will between ex-masters
and freedmen, to guard its work wholly from paternalistic methods which discouraged self-reliance,
and to carry out to any considerable extent its implied promises to furnish the freedmen
with land. Its successes were the result of hard work,
supplemented by the aid of philanthropists and the eager striving of black men.
Its failures were the result of bad local agents, the inherent difficulties of the work,
and national neglect. Such an institution, from its wide powers,
great responsibilities, large control of moneys, and generally conspicuous position, was naturally
open to repeated and bitter attack. It sustained a searching Congressional investigation
at the instance of Fernando Wood in 1870. Its archives and few remaining functions were
with blunt discourtesy transferred from Howard's control, in his absence, to the supervision
of Secretary of War Belknap in 1872, on the Secretary's recommendation. Finally, in consequence
of grave intimations of wrong-doing made by the Secretary and his subordinates, General
Howard was court-martialed in 1874. In both of these trials the Commissioner of
the Freedmen's Bureau was officially exonerated from any wilful misdoing, and his work commended.
Nevertheless, many unpleasant things were brought to light,—the methods of transacting
the business of the Bureau were faulty; several cases of defalcation were proved, and other
frauds strongly suspected; there were some business transactions which savored of dangerous
speculation, if not dishonesty; and around it all lay the smirch of the Freedmen's Bank.
Morally and practically, the Freedmen's Bank was part of the Freedmen's Bureau, although
it had no legal connection with it. With the prestige of the government back of
it, and a directing board of unusual respectability and national reputation, this banking institution
had made a remarkable start in the development of that thrift among black folk which slavery
had kept them from knowing. Then in one sad day came the crash,—all
the hard-earned dollars of the freedmen disappeared; but that was the least of the loss,—all
the faith in saving went too, and much of the faith in men; and that was a loss that
a Nation which to-day sneers at *** shiftlessness has never yet made good.
Not even ten additional years of slavery could have done so much to throttle the thrift of
the freedmen as the mismanagement and bankruptcy of the series of savings banks chartered by
the Nation for their especial aid. Where all the blame should rest, it is hard
to say; whether the Bureau and the Bank died chiefly by reason of the blows of its selfish
friends or the dark machinations of its foes, perhaps even time will never reveal, for here
lies unwritten history. Of the foes without the Bureau, the bitterest
were those who attacked not so much its conduct or policy under the law as the necessity for
any such institution at all. Such attacks came primarily from the Border
States and the South; and they were summed up by Senator Davis, of Kentucky, when he
moved to entitle the act of 1866 a bill "to promote strife and conflict between the white
and black races . . . by a grant of unconstitutional power."
The argument gathered tremendous strength South and North; but its very strength was
its weakness. For, argued the plain common-sense of the
nation, if it is unconstitutional, unpractical, and futile for the nation to stand guardian
over its helpless wards, then there is left but one alternative,—to make those wards
their own guardians by arming them with the ballot.
Moreover, the path of the practical politician pointed the same way; for, argued this opportunist,
if we cannot peacefully reconstruct the South with white votes, we certainly can with black
votes. So justice and force joined hands.
The alternative thus offered the nation was not between full and restricted *** suffrage;
else every sensible man, black and white, would easily have chosen the latter.
It was rather a choice between suffrage and slavery, after endless blood and gold had
flowed to sweep human bondage away. Not a single Southern legislature stood ready
to admit a ***, under any conditions, to the polls; not a single Southern legislature
believed free *** labor was possible without a system of restrictions that took all its
freedom away; there was scarcely a white man in the South who did not honestly regard Emancipation
as a crime, and its practical nullification as a duty.
In such a situation, the granting of the ballot to the black man was a necessity, the very
least a guilty nation could grant a wronged race, and the only method of compelling the
South to accept the results of the war. Thus *** suffrage ended a civil war by beginning
a race feud. And some felt gratitude toward the race thus
sacrificed in its swaddling clothes on the altar of national integrity; and some felt
and feel only indifference and contempt. Had political exigencies been less pressing,
the opposition to government guardianship of Negroes less bitter, and the attachment
to the slave system less strong, the social seer can well imagine a far better policy,—a
permanent Freedmen's Bureau, with a national system of *** schools; a carefully supervised
employment and labor office; a system of impartial protection before the regular courts; and
such institutions for social betterment as savings-banks, land and building associations,
and social settlements. All this vast expenditure of money and brains
might have formed a great school of prospective citizenship, and solved in a way we have not
yet solved the most perplexing and persistent of the *** problems.
That such an institution was unthinkable in 1870 was due in part to certain acts of the
Freedmen's Bureau itself. It came to regard its work as merely temporary,
and *** suffrage as a final answer to all present perplexities.
The political ambition of many of its agents and proteges led it far afield into questionable
activities, until the South, nursing its own deep prejudices, came easily to ignore all
the good deeds of the Bureau and hate its very name with perfect hatred. So the Freedmen's
Bureau died, and its child was the Fifteenth Amendment.
The passing of a great human institution before its work is done, like the untimely passing
of a single soul, but leaves a legacy of striving for other men.
The legacy of the Freedmen's Bureau is the heavy heritage of this generation.
To-day, when new and vaster problems are destined to strain every fibre of the national mind
and soul, would it not be well to count this legacy honestly and carefully?
For this much all men know: despite compromise, war, and struggle, the *** is not free.
In the backwoods of the Gulf States, for miles and miles, he may not leave the plantation
of his birth; in well-nigh the whole rural South the black farmers are peons, bound by
law and custom to an economic slavery, from which the only escape is death or the penitentiary.
In the most cultured sections and cities of the South the Negroes are a segregated servile
caste, with restricted rights and privileges. Before the courts, both in law and custom,
they stand on a different and peculiar basis. Taxation without representation is the rule
of their political life. And the result of all this is, and in nature
must have been, lawlessness and crime. That is the large legacy of the Freedmen's
Bureau, the work it did not do because it could not.
I have seen a land right merry with the sun, where children sing, and rolling hills lie
like passioned women wanton with harvest. And there in the King's Highways sat and sits
a figure veiled and bowed, by which the traveller's footsteps hasten as they go.
On the tainted air broods fear. Three centuries' thought has been the raising
and unveiling of that bowed human heart, and now behold a century new for the duty and
the deed. The problem of the Twentieth Century is the
problem of the color-line. End of Chapter II
Chapter III Of Mr. Booker T. Washington and Others
From birth till death enslaved; in word, in deed, unmanned!
Hereditary bondsmen! Know ye not
Who would be free themselves must strike the blow?
Byron
Easily the most striking thing in the history of the American *** since 1876 is the ascendancy
of Mr. Booker T. Washington. It began at the time when war memories and
ideals were rapidly passing; a day of astonishing commercial development was dawning; a sense
of doubt and hesitation overtook the freedmen's sons,—then it was that his leading began.
Mr. Washington came, with a simple definite programme, at the psychological moment when
the nation was a little ashamed of having bestowed so much sentiment on Negroes, and
was concentrating its energies on Dollars. His programme of industrial education, conciliation
of the South, and submission and silence as to civil and political rights, was not wholly
original; the Free Negroes from 1830 up to war-time had striven to build industrial schools,
and the American Missionary Association had from the first taught various trades; and
Price and others had sought a way of honorable alliance with the best of the Southerners.
But Mr. Washington first indissolubly linked these things; he put enthusiasm, unlimited
energy, and perfect faith into his programme, and changed it from a by-path into a veritable
Way of Life. And the tale of the methods by which he did
this is a fascinating study of human life. It startled the nation to hear a *** advocating
such a programme after many decades of bitter complaint; it startled and won the applause
of the South, it interested and won the admiration of the North; and after a confused murmur
of protest, it silenced if it did not convert the Negroes themselves.
To gain the sympathy and cooperation of the various elements comprising the white South
was Mr. Washington's first task; and this, at the time Tuskegee was founded, seemed,
for a black man, well-nigh impossible. And yet ten years later it was done in the word
spoken at Atlanta: "In all things purely social we can be as separate as the five fingers,
and yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress."
This "Atlanta Compromise" is by all odds the most notable thing in Mr. Washington's career.
The South interpreted it in different ways: the radicals received it as a complete surrender
of the demand for civil and political equality; the conservatives, as a generously conceived
working basis for mutual understanding. So both approved it, and to-day its author
is certainly the most distinguished Southerner since Jefferson Davis, and the one with the
largest personal following. Next to this achievement comes Mr. Washington's
work in gaining place and consideration in the North.
Others less shrewd and tactful had formerly essayed to sit on these two stools and had
fallen between them; but as Mr. Washington knew the heart of the South from birth and
training, so by singular insight he intuitively grasped the spirit of the age which was dominating
the North. And so thoroughly did he learn the speech
and thought of triumphant commercialism, and the ideals of material prosperity, that the
picture of a lone black boy poring over a French grammar amid the weeds and dirt of
a neglected home soon seemed to him the acme of absurdities.
One wonders what Socrates and St. Francis of Assisi would say to this.
And yet this very singleness of vision and thorough oneness with his age is a mark of
the successful man. It is as though Nature must needs make men
narrow in order to give them force. So Mr. Washington's cult has gained unquestioning
followers, his work has wonderfully prospered, his friends are legion, and his enemies are
confounded. To-day he stands as the one recognized spokesman
of his ten million fellows, and one of the most notable figures in a nation of seventy
millions. One hesitates, therefore, to criticise a life
which, beginning with so little, has done so much.
And yet the time is come when one may speak in all sincerity and utter courtesy of the
mistakes and shortcomings of Mr. Washington's career, as well as of his triumphs, without
being thought captious or envious, and without forgetting that it is easier to do ill than
well in the world. The criticism that has hitherto met Mr. Washington
has not always been of this broad character. In the South especially has he had to walk
warily to avoid the harshest judgments,—and naturally so, for he is dealing with the one
subject of deepest sensitiveness to that section. Twice—once when at the Chicago celebration
of the Spanish-American War he alluded to the color-prejudice that is "eating away the
vitals of the South," and once when he dined with President Roosevelt—has the resulting
Southern criticism been violent enough to threaten seriously his popularity.
In the North the feeling has several times forced itself into words, that Mr. Washington's
counsels of submission overlooked certain elements of true manhood, and that his educational
programme was unnecessarily narrow. Usually, however, such criticism has not found
open expression, although, too, the spiritual sons of the Abolitionists have not been prepared
to acknowledge that the schools founded before Tuskegee, by men of broad ideals and self-sacrificing
spirit, were wholly failures or worthy of ridicule.
While, then, criticism has not failed to follow Mr. Washington, yet the prevailing public
opinion of the land has been but too willing to deliver the solution of a wearisome problem
into his hands, and say, "If that is all you and your race ask, take it."
Among his own people, however, Mr. Washington has encountered the strongest and most lasting
opposition, amounting at times to bitterness, and even today continuing strong and insistent
even though largely silenced in outward expression by the public opinion of the nation.
Some of this opposition is, of course, mere envy; the disappointment of displaced demagogues
and the spite of narrow minds. But aside from this, there is among educated and thoughtful
colored men in all parts of the land a feeling of deep regret, sorrow, and apprehension at
the wide currency and ascendancy which some of Mr. Washington's theories have gained.
These same men admire his sincerity of purpose, and are willing to forgive much to honest
endeavor which is doing something worth the doing.
They cooperate with Mr. Washington as far as they conscientiously can; and, indeed,
it is no ordinary tribute to this man's tact and power that, steering as he must between
so many diverse interests and opinions, he so largely retains the respect of all.
But the hushing of the criticism of honest opponents is a dangerous thing.
It leads some of the best of the critics to unfortunate silence and paralysis of effort,
and others to burst into speech so passionately and intemperately as to lose listeners.
Honest and earnest criticism from those whose interests are most nearly touched,—criticism
of writers by readers,—this is the soul of democracy and the safeguard of modern society.
If the best of the American Negroes receive by outer pressure a leader whom they had not
recognized before, manifestly there is here a certain palpable gain. Yet there is also
irreparable loss,—a loss of that peculiarly valuable education which a group receives
when by search and criticism it finds and commissions its own leaders.
The way in which this is done is at once the most elementary and the nicest problem of
social growth. History is but the record of such group-leadership; and yet how infinitely
changeful is its type and character! And of all types and kinds, what can be more
instructive than the leadership of a group within a group?—that curious double movement
where real progress may be negative and actual advance be relative retrogression.
All this is the social student's inspiration and despair.
Now in the past the American *** has had instructive experience in the choosing of
group leaders, founding thus a peculiar dynasty which in the light of present conditions is
worth while studying. When sticks and stones and beasts form the
sole environment of a people, their attitude is largely one of determined opposition to
and conquest of natural forces. But when to earth and brute is added an environment
of men and ideas, then the attitude of the imprisoned group may take three main forms,—a
feeling of revolt and revenge; an attempt to adjust all thought and action to the will
of the greater group; or, finally, a determined effort at self-realization and self-development
despite environing opinion. The influence of all of these attitudes at
various times can be traced in the history of the American ***, and in the evolution
of his successive leaders. Before 1750, while the fire of African freedom
still burned in the veins of the slaves, there was in all leadership or attempted leadership
but the one motive of revolt and revenge,—typified in the terrible Maroons, the Danish blacks,
and Cato of Stono, and veiling all the Americas in fear of insurrection.
The liberalizing tendencies of the latter half of the eighteenth century brought, along
with kindlier relations between black and white, thoughts of ultimate adjustment and
assimilation. Such aspiration was especially voiced in the
earnest songs of Phyllis, in the martyrdom of Attucks, the fighting of Salem and Poor,
the intellectual accomplishments of Banneker and Derham, and the political demands of the
Cuffes. Stern financial and social stress after the
war cooled much of the previous humanitarian ardor.
The disappointment and impatience of the Negroes at the persistence of slavery and serfdom
voiced itself in two movements. The slaves in the South, aroused undoubtedly
by vague rumors of the Haytian revolt, made three fierce attempts at insurrection,—in
1800 under Gabriel in Virginia, in 1822 under Vesey in Carolina, and in 1831 again in Virginia
under the terrible Nat Turner. In the Free States, on the other hand, a new
and curious attempt at self-development was made.
In Philadelphia and New York color-prescription led to a withdrawal of *** communicants
from white churches and the formation of a peculiar socio-religious institution among
the Negroes known as the African Church,—an organization still living and controlling
in its various branches over a million of men.
Walker's wild appeal against the trend of the times showed how the world was changing
after the coming of the cotton-gin. By 1830 slavery seemed hopelessly fastened
on the South, and the slaves thoroughly cowed into submission.
The free Negroes of the North, inspired by the mulatto immigrants from the West Indies,
began to change the basis of their demands; they recognized the slavery of slaves, but
insisted that they themselves were freemen, and sought assimilation and amalgamation with
the nation on the same terms with other men. Thus, Forten and Purvis of Philadelphia, Shad
of Wilmington, Du Bois of New Haven, Barbadoes of Boston, and others, strove singly and together
as men, they said, not as slaves; as "people of color," not as "Negroes."
The trend of the times, however, refused them recognition save in individual and exceptional
cases, considered them as one with all the despised blacks, and they soon found themselves
striving to keep even the rights they formerly had of voting and working and moving as freemen.
Schemes of migration and colonization arose among them; but these they refused to entertain,
and they eventually turned to the Abolition movement as a final refuge.
Here, led by Remond, Nell, Wells-Brown, and Douglass, a new period of self-assertion and
self-development dawned. To be sure, ultimate freedom and assimilation
was the ideal before the leaders, but the assertion of the manhood rights of the ***
by himself was the main reliance, and John Brown's raid was the extreme of its logic.
After the war and emancipation, the great form of Frederick Douglass, the greatest of
American *** leaders, still led the host. Self-assertion, especially in political lines,
was the main programme, and behind Douglass came Elliot, Bruce, and Langston, and the
Reconstruction politicians, and, less conspicuous but of greater social significance, Alexander
Crummell and Bishop Daniel Payne. Then came the Revolution of 1876, the suppression
of the *** votes, the changing and shifting of ideals, and the seeking of new lights in
the great night. Douglass, in his old age, still bravely stood
for the ideals of his early manhood,—ultimate assimilation through self-assertion, and on
no other terms. For a time Price arose as a new leader, destined,
it seemed, not to give up, but to re-state the old ideals in a form less repugnant to
the white South. But he passed away in his prime.
Then came the new leader. Nearly all the former ones had become leaders
by the silent suffrage of their fellows, had sought to lead their own people alone, and
were usually, save Douglass, little known outside their race.
But Booker T. Washington arose as essentially the leader not of one race but of two,—a
compromiser between the South, the North, and the ***.
Naturally the Negroes resented, at first bitterly, signs of compromise which surrendered their
civil and political rights, even though this was to be exchanged for larger chances of
economic development. The rich and dominating North, however, was
not only weary of the race problem, but was investing largely in Southern enterprises,
and welcomed any method of peaceful cooperation. Thus, by national opinion, the Negroes began
to recognize Mr. Washington's leadership; and the voice of criticism was hushed.
Mr. Washington represents in *** thought the old attitude of adjustment and submission;
but adjustment at such a peculiar time as to make his programme unique.
This is an age of unusual economic development, and Mr. Washington's programme naturally takes
an economic cast, becoming a gospel of Work and Money to such an extent as apparently
almost completely to overshadow the higher aims of life. Moreover, this is an age when
the more advanced races are coming in closer contact with the less developed races, and
the race-feeling is therefore intensified; and Mr. Washington's programme practically
accepts the alleged inferiority of the *** races.
Again, in our own land, the reaction from the sentiment of war time has given impetus
to race-prejudice against Negroes, and Mr. Washington withdraws many of the high demands
of Negroes as men and American citizens. In other periods of intensified prejudice
all the ***'s tendency to self-assertion has been called forth; at this period a policy
of submission is advocated. In the history of nearly all other races and
peoples the doctrine preached at such crises has been that manly self-respect is worth
more than lands and houses, and that a people who voluntarily surrender such respect, or
cease striving for it, are not worth civilizing. In answer to this, it has been claimed that
the *** can survive only through submission. Mr. Washington distinctly asks that black
people give up, at least for the present, three things,—
First, political power, Second, insistence on civil rights,
Third, higher education of *** youth,—and concentrate all their energies on industrial
education, and accumulation of wealth, and the conciliation of the South.
This policy has been courageously and insistently advocated for over fifteen years, and has
been triumphant for perhaps ten years. As a result of this tender of the palm-branch,
what has been the return? In these years there have occurred:
1. The disfranchisement of the ***.
2. The legal creation of a distinct status of
civil inferiority for the ***. 3.
The steady withdrawal of aid from institutions for the higher training of the ***.
These movements are not, to be sure, direct results of Mr. Washington's teachings; but
his propaganda has, without a shadow of doubt, helped their speedier accomplishment.
The question then comes: Is it possible, and probable, that nine millions of men can make
effective progress in economic lines if they are deprived of political rights, made a servile
caste, and allowed only the most meagre chance for developing their exceptional men?
If history and reason give any distinct answer to these questions, it is an emphatic NO.
And Mr. Washington thus faces the triple paradox of his career:
1. He is striving nobly to make *** artisans
business men and property-owners; but it is utterly impossible, under modern competitive
methods, for workingmen and property-owners to defend their rights and exist without the
right of suffrage. 2.
He insists on thrift and self-respect, but at the same time counsels a silent submission
to civic inferiority such as is bound to sap the manhood of any race in the long run.
3. He advocates common-school and industrial
training, and depreciates institutions of higher learning; but neither the *** common-schools,
nor Tuskegee itself, could remain open a day were it not for teachers trained in ***
colleges, or trained by their graduates. This triple paradox in Mr. Washington's position
is the object of criticism by two classes of colored Americans.
One class is spiritually descended from Toussaint the Savior, through Gabriel, Vesey, and Turner,
and they represent the attitude of revolt and revenge; they hate the white South blindly
and distrust the white race generally, and so far as they agree on definite action, think
that the ***'s only hope lies in emigration beyond the borders of the United States.
And yet, by the irony of fate, nothing has more effectually made this programme seem
hopeless than the recent course of the United States toward weaker and darker peoples in
the West Indies, Hawaii, and the Philippines,—for where in the world may we go and be safe from
lying and brute force? The other class of Negroes who cannot agree
with Mr. Washington has hitherto said little aloud.
They deprecate the sight of scattered counsels, of internal disagreement; and especially they
dislike making their just criticism of a useful and earnest man an excuse for a general discharge
of venom from small-minded opponents. Nevertheless, the questions involved are so
fundamental and serious that it is difficult to see how men like the Grimkes, Kelly Miller,
J. W. E. Bowen, and other representatives of this group, can much longer be silent.
Such men feel in conscience bound to ask of this nation three things:
1. The right to vote.
2. Civic equality.
3. The education of youth according to ability.
They acknowledge Mr. Washington's invaluable service in counselling patience and courtesy
in such demands; they do not ask that ignorant black men vote when ignorant whites are debarred,
or that any reasonable restrictions in the suffrage should not be applied; they know
that the low social level of the mass of the race is responsible for much discrimination
against it, but they also know, and the nation knows, that relentless color-prejudice is
more often a cause than a result of the ***'s degradation; they seek the abatement of this
relic of barbarism, and not its systematic encouragement and pampering by all agencies
of social power from the Associated Press to the Church of Christ.
They advocate, with Mr. Washington, a broad system of *** common schools supplemented
by thorough industrial training; but they are surprised that a man of Mr. Washington's
insight cannot see that no such educational system ever has rested or can rest on any
other basis than that of the well-equipped college and university, and they insist that
there is a demand for a few such institutions throughout the South to train the best of
the *** youth as teachers, professional men, and leaders.
This group of men honor Mr. Washington for his attitude of conciliation toward the white
South; they accept the "Atlanta Compromise" in its broadest interpretation; they recognize,
with him, many signs of promise, many men of high purpose and fair judgment, in this
section; they know that no easy task has been laid upon a region already tottering under
heavy burdens. But, nevertheless, they insist that the way
to truth and right lies in straightforward honesty, not in indiscriminate flattery; in
praising those of the South who do well and criticising uncompromisingly those who do
ill; in taking advantage of the opportunities at hand and urging their fellows to do the
same, but at the same time in remembering that only a firm adherence to their higher
ideals and aspirations will ever keep those ideals within the realm of possibility.
They do not expect that the free right to vote, to enjoy civic rights, and to be educated,
will come in a moment; they do not expect to see the bias and prejudices of years disappear
at the blast of a trumpet; but they are absolutely certain that the way for a people to gain
their reasonable rights is not by voluntarily throwing them away and insisting that they
do not want them; that the way for a people to gain respect is not by continually belittling
and ridiculing themselves; that, on the contrary, Negroes must insist continually, in season
and out of season, that voting is necessary to modern manhood, that color discrimination
is barbarism, and that black boys need education as well as white boys.
In failing thus to state plainly and unequivocally the legitimate demands of their people, even
at the cost of opposing an honored leader, the thinking classes of American Negroes would
shirk a heavy responsibility,—a responsibility to themselves, a responsibility to the struggling
masses, a responsibility to the darker races of men whose future depends so largely on
this American experiment, but especially a responsibility to this nation,—this common
Fatherland. It is wrong to encourage a man or a people in evil-doing; it is wrong to
aid and abet a national crime simply because it is unpopular not to do so.
The growing spirit of kindliness and reconciliation between the North and South after the frightful
difference of a generation ago ought to be a source of deep congratulation to all, and
especially to those whose mistreatment caused the war; but if that reconciliation is to
be marked by the industrial slavery and civic death of those same black men, with permanent
legislation into a position of inferiority, then those black men, if they are really men,
are called upon by every consideration of patriotism and loyalty to oppose such a course
by all civilized methods, even though such opposition involves disagreement with Mr.
Booker T. Washington. We have no right to sit silently by while
the inevitable seeds are sown for a harvest of disaster to our children, black and white.
First, it is the duty of black men to judge the South discriminatingly. The present generation
of Southerners are not responsible for the past, and they should not be blindly hated
or blamed for it. Furthermore, to no class is the indiscriminate
endorsement of the recent course of the South toward Negroes more nauseating than to the
best thought of the South. The South is not "solid"; it is a land in
the ferment of social change, wherein forces of all kinds are fighting for supremacy; and
to praise the ill the South is today perpetrating is just as wrong as to condemn the good.
Discriminating and broad-minded criticism is what the South needs,—needs it for the
sake of her own white sons and daughters, and for the insurance of robust, healthy mental
and moral development. Today even the attitude of the Southern whites
toward the blacks is not, as so many assume, in all cases the same; the ignorant Southerner
hates the ***, the workingmen fear his competition, the money-makers wish to use him as a laborer,
some of the educated see a menace in his upward development, while others—usually the sons
of the masters—wish to help him to rise. National opinion has enabled this last class
to maintain the *** common schools, and to protect the *** partially in property,
life, and limb. Through the pressure of the money-makers,
the *** is in danger of being reduced to semi-slavery, especially in the country districts;
the workingmen, and those of the educated who fear the ***, have united to disfranchise
him, and some have urged his deportation; while the passions of the ignorant are easily
aroused to lynch and abuse any black man. To praise this intricate whirl of thought
and prejudice is nonsense; to inveigh indiscriminately against "the South" is unjust; but to use
the same breath in praising Governor Aycock, exposing Senator Morgan, arguing with Mr.
Thomas Nelson Page, and denouncing Senator Ben Tillman, is not only sane, but the imperative
duty of thinking black men. It would be unjust to Mr. Washington not to
acknowledge that in several instances he has opposed movements in the South which were
unjust to the ***; he sent memorials to the Louisiana and Alabama constitutional conventions,
he has spoken against lynching, and in other ways has openly or silently set his influence
against sinister schemes and unfortunate happenings. Notwithstanding this, it is equally true to
assert that on the whole the distinct impression left by Mr. Washington's propaganda is, first,
that the South is justified in its present attitude toward the *** because of the ***'s
degradation; secondly, that the prime cause of the ***'s failure to rise more quickly
is his wrong education in the past; and, thirdly, that his future rise depends primarily on
his own efforts. Each of these propositions is a dangerous
half-truth. The supplementary truths must never be lost
sight of: first, slavery and race-prejudice are potent if not sufficient causes of the
***'s position; second, industrial and common-school training were necessarily slow in planting
because they had to await the black teachers trained by higher institutions,—it being
extremely doubtful if any essentially different development was possible, and certainly a
Tuskegee was unthinkable before 1880; and, third, while it is a great truth to say that
the *** must strive and strive mightily to help himself, it is equally true that unless
his striving be not simply seconded, but rather aroused and encouraged, by the initiative
of the richer and wiser environing group, he cannot hope for great success.
In his failure to realize and impress this last point, Mr. Washington is especially to
be criticised. His doctrine has tended to make the whites,
North and South, shift the burden of the *** problem to the ***'s shoulders and stand
aside as critical and rather pessimistic spectators; when in fact the burden belongs to the nation,
and the hands of none of us are clean if we bend not our energies to righting these great
wrongs. The South ought to be led, by candid and honest
criticism, to assert her better self and do her full duty to the race she has cruelly
wronged and is still wronging. The North—her co-partner in guilt—cannot
salve her conscience by plastering it with gold.
We cannot settle this problem by diplomacy and suaveness, by "policy" alone.
If worse come to worst, can the moral fibre of this country survive the slow throttling
and *** of nine millions of men? The black men of America have a duty to perform,
a duty stern and delicate,—a forward movement to oppose a part of the work of their greatest
leader. So far as Mr. Washington preaches Thrift,
Patience, and Industrial Training for the masses, we must hold up his hands and strive
with him, rejoicing in his honors and glorying in the strength of this Joshua called of God
and of man to lead the headless host. But so far as Mr. Washington apologizes for
injustice, North or South, does not rightly value the privilege and duty of voting, belittles
the emasculating effects of caste distinctions, and opposes the higher training and ambition
of our brighter minds,—so far as he, the South, or the Nation, does this,—we must
unceasingly and firmly oppose them. By every civilized and peaceful method we must strive
for the rights which the world accords to men, clinging unwaveringly to those great
words which the sons of the Fathers would fain forget: "We hold these truths to be self-evident:
That all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain
unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."
End of Chapter III
Chapter IV Of the Meaning of Progress
Willst Du Deine Macht verkunden, Wahle sie die frei von Sunden,
Steh'n in Deinem ew'gen Haus! Deine Geister sende aus!
Die Unsterblichen, die Reinen, Die nicht fuhlen, die nicht weinen!
Nicht die zarte Jungfrau wahle, Nicht der Hirtin weiche Seele!
Schiller Once upon a time I taught school in the hills
of Tennessee, where the broad dark vale of the Mississippi begins to roll and crumple
to greet the Alleghanies. I was a Fisk student then, and all Fisk men
thought that Tennessee—beyond the Veil—was theirs alone, and in vacation time they sallied
forth in *** bands to meet the county school-commissioners. Young and happy, I too went, and I shall not
soon forget that summer, seventeen years ago. First, there was a Teachers' Institute at
the county-seat; and there distinguished guests of the superintendent taught the teachers
fractions and spelling and other mysteries,—white teachers in the morning, Negroes at night.
A picnic now and then, and a supper, and the rough world was softened by laughter and song.
I remember how— But I wander. There came a day when all the teachers left
the Institute and began the hunt for schools. I learn from hearsay (for my mother was mortally
afraid of firearms) that the hunting of ducks and bears and men is wonderfully interesting,
but I am sure that the man who has never hunted a country school has something to learn of
the pleasures of the chase. I see now the white, hot roads lazily rise
and fall and wind before me under the burning July sun; I feel the deep weariness of heart
and limb as ten, eight, six miles stretch relentlessly ahead; I feel my heart sink heavily
as I hear again and again, "Got a teacher? Yes."
So I walked on and on—horses were too expensive—until I had wandered beyond railways, beyond stage
lines, to a land of "varmints" and rattlesnakes, where the coming of a stranger was an event,
and men lived and died in the shadow of one blue hill.
Sprinkled over hill and dale lay cabins and farmhouses, shut out from the world by the
forests and the rolling hills toward the east. There I found at last a little school.
Josie told me of it; she was a thin, homely girl of twenty, with a dark-brown face and
thick, hard hair. I had crossed the stream at Watertown, and
rested under the great willows; then I had gone to the little cabin in the lot where
Josie was resting on her way to town. The gaunt farmer made me welcome, and Josie,
hearing my errand, told me anxiously that they wanted a school over the hill; that but
once since the war had a teacher been there; that she herself longed to learn,—and thus
she ran on, talking fast and loud, with much earnestness and energy.
Next morning I crossed the tall round hill, lingered to look at the blue and yellow mountains
stretching toward the Carolinas, then plunged into the wood, and came out at Josie's home.
It was a dull frame cottage with four rooms, perched just below the brow of the hill, amid
peach-trees. The father was a quiet, simple soul, calmly
ignorant, with no touch of vulgarity. The mother was different,—strong, bustling,
and energetic, with a quick, restless tongue, and an ambition to live "like folks." There
was a crowd of children. Two boys had gone away.
There remained two growing girls; a shy midget of eight; John, tall, awkward, and eighteen;
Jim, younger, quicker, and better looking; and two babies of indefinite age.
Then there was Josie herself. She seemed to be the centre of the family:
always busy at service, or at home, or berry-picking; a little nervous and inclined to scold, like
her mother, yet faithful, too, like her father. She had about her a certain fineness, the
shadow of an unconscious moral heroism that would willingly give all of life to make life
broader, deeper, and fuller for her and hers. I saw much of this family afterwards, and
grew to love them for their honest efforts to be decent and comfortable, and for their
knowledge of their own ignorance. There was with them no affectation.
The mother would scold the father for being so "easy"; Josie would roundly berate the
boys for carelessness; and all knew that it was a hard thing to dig a living out of a
rocky side-hill. I secured the school.
I remember the day I rode horseback out to the commissioner's house with a pleasant young
white fellow who wanted the white school. The road ran down the bed of a stream; the
sun laughed and the water jingled, and we rode on.
"Come in," said the commissioner,—"come in.
Have a seat. Yes, that certificate will do. Stay to dinner.
What do you want a month?" "Oh," thought I, "this is lucky"; but even
then fell the awful shadow of the Veil, for they ate first, then I—alone.
The schoolhouse was a log hut, where Colonel Wheeler used to shelter his corn.
It sat in a lot behind a rail fence and thorn bushes, near the sweetest of springs.
There was an entrance where a door once was, and within, a massive rickety fireplace; great
chinks between the logs served as windows. Furniture was scarce.
A pale blackboard crouched in the corner. My desk was made of three boards, reinforced
at critical points, and my chair, borrowed from the landlady, had to be returned every
night. Seats for the children—these puzzled me
much. I was haunted by a New England vision of neat little desks and chairs, but, alas!
the reality was rough plank benches without backs, and at times without legs.
They had the one virtue of making naps dangerous,—possibly fatal, for the floor was not to be trusted.
It was a hot morning late in July when the school opened.
I trembled when I heard the patter of little feet down the dusty road, and saw the growing
row of dark solemn faces and bright eager eyes facing me. First came Josie and her brothers
and sisters. The longing to know, to be a student in the
great school at Nashville, hovered like a star above this child-woman amid her work
and worry, and she studied doggedly. There were the Dowells from their farm over
toward Alexandria,—***, with her smooth black face and wondering eyes; Martha, brown
and dull; the pretty girl-wife of a brother, and the younger brood.
There were the Burkes,—two brown and yellow lads, and a tiny haughty-eyed girl.
Fat Reuben's little chubby girl came, with golden face and old-gold hair, faithful and
solemn. 'Thenie was on hand early,—a jolly, ugly,
good-hearted girl, who slyly dipped snuff and looked after her little bow-legged brother.
When her mother could spare her, 'Tildy came,—a midnight beauty, with starry eyes and tapering
limbs; and her brother, correspondingly homely. And then the big boys,—the hulking Lawrences;
the lazy Neills, unfathered sons of mother and daughter; Hickman, with a stoop in his
shoulders; and the rest. There they sat, nearly thirty of them, on
the rough benches, their faces shading from a pale cream to a deep brown, the little feet
bare and swinging, the eyes full of expectation, with here and there a twinkle of mischief,
and the hands grasping Webster's blue-black spelling-book.
I loved my school, and the fine faith the children had in the wisdom of their teacher
was truly marvellous. We read and spelled together, wrote a little,
picked flowers, sang, and listened to stories of the world beyond the hill.
At times the school would dwindle away, and I would start out.
I would visit Mun Eddings, who lived in two very dirty rooms, and ask why little Lugene,
whose flaming face seemed ever ablaze with the dark-red hair uncombed, was absent all
last week, or why I missed so often the inimitable rags of Mack and Ed. Then the father, who
worked Colonel Wheeler's farm on shares, would tell me how the crops needed the boys; and
the thin, slovenly mother, whose face was pretty when washed, assured me that Lugene
must mind the baby. "But we'll start them again next week."
When the Lawrences stopped, I knew that the doubts of the old folks about book-learning
had conquered again, and so, toiling up the hill, and getting as far into the cabin as
possible, I put Cicero "pro Archia Poeta" into the simplest English with local applications,
and usually convinced them—for a week or so.
On Friday nights I often went home with some of the children,—sometimes to Doc Burke's
farm. He was a great, loud, thin Black, ever working,
and trying to buy the seventy-five acres of hill and dale where he lived; but people said
that he would surely fail, and the "white folks would get it all."
His wife was a magnificent Amazon, with saffron face and shining hair, uncorseted and barefooted,
and the children were strong and beautiful. They lived in a one-and-a-half-room cabin
in the hollow of the farm, near the spring. The front room was full of great fat white
beds, scrupulously neat; and there were bad chromos on the walls, and a tired centre-table.
In the tiny back kitchen I was often invited to "take out and help" myself to fried chicken
and wheat biscuit, "meat" and corn pone, string-beans and berries.
At first I used to be a little alarmed at the approach of bedtime in the one lone bedroom,
but embarrassment was very deftly avoided. First, all the children nodded and slept,
and were stowed away in one great pile of goose feathers; next, the mother and the father
discreetly slipped away to the kitchen while I went to bed; then, blowing out the dim light,
they retired in the dark. In the morning all were up and away before
I thought of awaking. Across the road, where fat Reuben lived, they
all went outdoors while the teacher retired, because they did not boast the luxury of a
kitchen. I liked to stay with the Dowells, for they
had four rooms and plenty of good country fare.
Uncle Bird had a small, rough farm, all woods and hills, miles from the big road; but he
was full of tales,—he preached now and then,—and with his children, berries, horses, and wheat
he was happy and prosperous. Often, to keep the peace, I must go where
life was less lovely; for instance, 'Tildy's mother was incorrigibly dirty, Reuben's larder
was limited seriously, and herds of untamed insects wandered over the Eddingses' beds.
Best of all I loved to go to Josie's, and sit on the porch, eating peaches, while the
mother bustled and talked: how Josie had bought the sewing-machine; how Josie worked at service
in winter, but that four dollars a month was "mighty little" wages; how Josie longed to
go away to school, but that it "looked like" they never could get far enough ahead to let
her; how the crops failed and the well was yet unfinished; and, finally, how "mean" some
of the white folks were. For two summers I lived in this little world;
it was dull and humdrum. The girls looked at the hill in wistful longing, and the boys
fretted and haunted Alexandria. Alexandria was "town,"—a straggling, lazy
village of houses, churches, and shops, and an aristocracy of Toms, Dicks, and Captains.
Cuddled on the hill to the north was the village of the colored folks, who lived in three-
or four-room unpainted cottages, some neat and homelike, and some dirty.
The dwellings were scattered rather aimlessly, but they centred about the twin temples of
the hamlet, the Methodist, and the Hard-Shell Baptist churches.
These, in turn, leaned gingerly on a sad-colored schoolhouse.
Hither my little world wended its crooked way on Sunday to meet other worlds, and gossip,
and wonder, and make the weekly sacrifice with frenzied priest at the altar of the "old-time
religion." Then the soft melody and mighty cadences of
*** song fluttered and thundered. I have called my tiny community a world, and
so its isolation made it; and yet there was among us but a half-awakened common consciousness,
sprung from common joy and grief, at burial, birth, or wedding; from a common hardship
in poverty, poor land, and low wages; and, above all, from the sight of the Veil that
hung between us and Opportunity. All this caused us to think some thoughts
together; but these, when ripe for speech, were spoken in various languages.
Those whose eyes twenty-five and more years before had seen "the glory of the coming of
the Lord," saw in every present hindrance or help a dark fatalism bound to bring all
things right in His own good time. The mass of those to whom slavery was a dim
recollection of childhood found the world a puzzling thing: it asked little of them,
and they answered with little, and yet it ridiculed their offering.
Such a paradox they could not understand, and therefore sank into listless indifference,
or shiftlessness, or reckless bravado. There were, however, some—such as Josie,
Jim, and Ben—to whom War, Hell, and Slavery were but childhood tales, whose young appetites
had been whetted to an edge by school and story and half-awakened thought.
Ill could they be content, born without and beyond the World.
And their weak wings beat against their barriers,—barriers of caste, of youth, of life; at last, in dangerous
moments, against everything that opposed even a whim.
The ten years that follow youth, the years when first the realization comes that life
is leading somewhere,—these were the years that passed after I left my little school.
When they were past, I came by chance once more to the walls of Fisk University, to the
halls of the chapel of melody. As I lingered there in the joy and pain of
meeting old school-friends, there swept over me a sudden longing to pass again beyond the
blue hill, and to see the homes and the school of other days, and to learn how life had gone
with my school-children; and I went. Josie was dead, and the gray-haired mother
said simply, "We've had a heap of trouble since you've been away."
I had feared for Jim. With a cultured parentage and a social caste
to uphold him, he might have made a venturesome merchant or a West Point cadet.
But here he was, angry with life and reckless; and when Fanner Durham charged him with stealing
wheat, the old man had to ride fast to escape the stones which the furious fool hurled after
him. They told Jim to run away; but he would not
run, and the constable came that afternoon. It grieved Josie, and great awkward John walked
nine miles every day to see his little brother through the bars of Lebanon jail.
At last the two came back together in the dark night.
The mother cooked supper, and Josie emptied her purse, and the boys stole away.
Josie grew thin and silent, yet worked the more.
The hill became steep for the quiet old father, and with the boys away there was little to
do in the valley. Josie helped them to sell the old farm, and they moved nearer town.
Brother Dennis, the carpenter, built a new house with six rooms; Josie toiled a year
in Nashville, and brought back ninety dollars to furnish the house and change it to a home.
When the spring came, and the birds twittered, and the stream ran proud and full, little
sister Lizzie, bold and thoughtless, flushed with the passion of youth, bestowed herself
on the tempter, and brought home a nameless child.
Josie shivered and worked on, with the vision of schooldays all fled, with a face wan and
tired,—worked until, on a summer's day, some one married another; then Josie crept
to her mother like a hurt child, and slept—and sleeps.
I paused to scent the breeze as I entered the valley.
The Lawrences have gone,—father and son forever,—and the other son lazily digs in
the earth to live. A new young widow rents out their cabin to
fat Reuben. Reuben is a Baptist preacher now, but I fear
as lazy as ever, though his cabin has three rooms; and little Ella has grown into a bouncing
woman, and is ploughing corn on the hot hillside. There are babies a-plenty, and one half-witted
girl. Across the valley is a house I did not know
before, and there I found, rocking one baby and expecting another, one of my schoolgirls,
a daughter of Uncle Bird Dowell. She looked somewhat worried with her new duties,
but soon bristled into pride over her neat cabin and the tale of her thrifty husband,
and the horse and cow, and the farm they were planning to buy.
My log schoolhouse was gone. In its place stood Progress; and Progress,
I understand, is necessarily ugly. The crazy foundation stones still marked the
former site of my poor little cabin, and not far away, on six weary boulders, perched a
jaunty board house, perhaps twenty by thirty feet, with three windows and a door that locked.
Some of the window-glass was broken, and part of an old iron stove lay mournfully under
the house. I peeped through the window half reverently,
and found things that were more familiar. The blackboard had grown by about two feet,
and the seats were still without backs. The county owns the lot now, I hear, and every
year there is a session of school. As I sat by the spring and looked on the Old
and the New I felt glad, very glad, and yet— After two long drinks I started on.
There was the great double log-house on the corner.
I remembered the broken, blighted family that used to live there.
The strong, hard face of the mother, with its wilderness of hair, rose before me.
She had driven her husband away, and while I taught school a strange man lived there,
big and jovial, and people talked. I felt sure that Ben and 'Tildy would come
to naught from such a home. But this is an odd world; for Ben is a busy
farmer in Smith County, "doing well, too," they say, and he had cared for little 'Tildy
until last spring, when a lover married her. A hard life the lad had led, toiling for meat,
and laughed at because he was homely and crooked. There was Sam Carlon, an impudent old skinflint,
who had definite notions about "***," and hired Ben a summer and would not pay him.
Then the hungry boy gathered his sacks together, and in broad daylight went into Carlon's corn;
and when the hard-*** farmer set upon him, the angry boy flew at him like a beast.
Doc Burke saved a *** and a lynching that day.
The story reminded me again of the Burkes, and an impatience seized me to know who won
in the battle, Doc or the seventy-five acres. For it is a hard thing to make a farm out
of nothing, even in fifteen years. So I hurried on, thinking of the Burkes.
They used to have a certain magnificent barbarism about them that I liked.
They were never vulgar, never immoral, but rather rough and primitive, with an unconventionality
that spent itself in loud guffaws, slaps on the back, and naps in the corner.
I hurried by the cottage of the misborn Neill boys.
It was empty, and they were grown into fat, lazy farm-hands.
I saw the home of the Hickmans, but Albert, with his stooping shoulders, had passed from
the world. Then I came to the Burkes' gate and peered
through; the enclosure looked rough and untrimmed, and yet there were the same fences around
the old farm save to the left, where lay twenty-five other acres.
And lo! the cabin in the hollow had climbed the hill and swollen to a half-finished six-room
cottage. The Burkes held a hundred acres, but they
were still in debt. Indeed, the gaunt father who toiled night
and day would scarcely be happy out of debt, being so used to it.
Some day he must stop, for his massive frame is showing decline.
The mother wore shoes, but the lion-like physique of other days was broken.
The children had grown up. Rob, the image of his father, was loud and
rough with laughter. Birdie, my school baby of six, had grown to
a picture of maiden beauty, tall and tawny. "Edgar is gone," said the mother, with head
half bowed,—"gone to work in Nashville; he and his father couldn't agree."
Little Doc, the boy born since the time of my school, took me horseback down the creek
next morning toward Farmer Dowell's. The road and the stream were battling for
mastery, and the stream had the better of it. We splashed and waded, and the merry boy,
perched behind me, chattered and laughed. He showed me where Simon Thompson had bought
a bit of ground and a home; but his daughter Lana, a plump, brown, slow girl, was not there.
She had married a man and a farm twenty miles away.
We wound on down the stream till we came to a gate that I did not recognize, but the boy
insisted that it was "Uncle Bird's." The farm was fat with the growing crop.
In that little valley was a strange stillness as I rode up; for death and marriage had stolen
youth and left age and childhood there. We sat and talked that night after the chores
were done. Uncle Bird was grayer, and his eyes did not
see so well, but he was still jovial. We talked of the acres bought,—one hundred
and twenty-five,—of the new guest-chamber added, of Martha's marrying.
Then we talked of death: *** and Fred were gone; a shadow hung over the other daughter,
and when it lifted she was to go to Nashville to school.
At last we spoke of the neighbors, and as night fell, Uncle Bird told me how, on a night
like that, 'Thenie came wandering back to her home over yonder, to escape the blows
of her husband. And next morning she died in the home that
her little bow-legged brother, working and saving, had bought for their widowed mother.
My journey was done, and behind me lay hill and dale, and Life and Death.
How shall man measure Progress there where the dark-faced Josie lies?
How many heartfuls of sorrow shall balance a bushel of wheat? How hard a thing is life
to the lowly, and yet how human and real! And all this life and love and strife and
failure,—is it the twilight of nightfall or the flush of some faint-dawning day?
Thus sadly musing, I rode to Nashville in the Jim Crow car.
End of Chapter IV
Chapter V Of the Wings of Atalanta
O black boy of Atlanta!
But half was spoken; The slave's chains and the master's
Alike are broken; The one curse of the races
Held both in tether; They are rising—all are rising—
The black and white together.
Whittier South of the North, yet north of the South,
lies the City of a Hundred Hills, peering out from the shadows of the past into the
promise of the future. I have seen her in the morning, when the first
flush of day had half-roused her; she lay gray and still on the crimson soil of Georgia;
then the blue smoke began to curl from her chimneys, the *** of bell and scream of
whistle broke the silence, the rattle and roar of busy life slowly gathered and swelled,
until the seething whirl of the city seemed a strange thing in a sleepy land.
Once, they say, even Atlanta slept dull and drowsy at the foot-hills of the Alleghanies,
until the iron baptism of war awakened her with its sullen waters, aroused and maddened
her, and left her listening to the sea. And the sea cried to the hills and the hills
answered the sea, till the city rose like a widow and cast away her weeds, and toiled
for her daily bread; toiled steadily, toiled cunningly,—perhaps with some bitterness,
with a touch, of reclame,—and yet with real earnestness, and real sweat.
It is a hard thing to live haunted by the ghost of an untrue dream; to see the wide
vision of empire fade into real ashes and dirt; to feel the pang of the conquered, and
yet know that with all the Bad that fell on one black day, something was vanquished that
deserved to live, something killed that in justice had not dared to die; to know that
with the Right that triumphed, triumphed something of Wrong, something sordid and mean, something
less than the broadest and best. All this is bitter hard; and many a man and
city and people have found in it excuse for sulking, and brooding, and listless waiting.
Such are not men of the sturdier make; they of Atlanta turned resolutely toward the future;
and that future held aloft vistas of purple and gold:—Atlanta, Queen of the cotton kingdom;
Atlanta, Gateway to the Land of the Sun; Atlanta, the new Lachesis, spinner of web and woof
for the world. So the city crowned her hundred hills with
factories, and stored her shops with cunning handiwork, and stretched long iron ways to
greet the busy Mercury in his coming. And the Nation talked of her striving.
Perhaps Atlanta was not christened for the winged maiden of dull Boeotia; you know the
tale,—how swarthy Atalanta, tall and wild, would marry only him who out-raced her; and
how the wily Hippomenes laid three apples of gold in the way.
She fled like a shadow, paused, startled over the first apple, but even as he stretched
his hand, fled again; hovered over the second, then, slipping from his hot grasp, flew over
river, vale, and hill; but as she lingered over the third, his arms fell round her, and
looking on each other, the blazing passion of their love profaned the sanctuary of Love,
and they were cursed. If Atlanta be not named for Atalanta, she
ought to have been. Atalanta is not the first or the last maiden
whom greed of gold has led to defile the temple of Love; and not maids alone, but men in the
race of life, sink from the high and generous ideals of youth to the gambler's code of the
Bourse; and in all our Nation's striving is not the Gospel of Work befouled by the Gospel
of Pay? So common is this that one-half think it normal;
so unquestioned, that we almost fear to question if the end of racing is not gold, if the aim
of man is not rightly to be rich. And if this is the fault of America, how dire
a danger lies before a new land and a new city, lest Atlanta, stooping for mere gold,
shall find that gold accursed! It was no maiden's idle whim that started
this hard racing; a fearful wilderness lay about the feet of that city after the War,—feudalism,
poverty, the rise of the Third Estate, serfdom, the re-birth of Law and Order, and above and
between all, the Veil of Race. How heavy a journey for weary feet!
what wings must Atalanta have to flit over all this hollow and hill, through sour wood
and sullen water, and by the red waste of sun-baked clay!
How fleet must Atalanta be if she will not be tempted by gold to profane the Sanctuary!
The Sanctuary of our fathers has, to be sure, few Gods,—some sneer, "all too few."
There is the thrifty Mercury of New England, Pluto of the North, and Ceres of the West;
and there, too, is the half-forgotten Apollo of the South, under whose aegis the maiden
ran,—and as she ran she forgot him, even as there in Boeotia Venus was forgot.
She forgot the old ideal of the Southern gentleman,—that new-world heir of the grace and courtliness
of patrician, knight, and noble; forgot his honor with his foibles, his kindliness with
his carelessness, and stooped to apples of gold,—to men busier and sharper, thriftier
and more unscrupulous. Golden apples are beautiful—I remember the
lawless days of boyhood, when orchards in crimson and gold tempted me over fence and
field—and, too, the merchant who has dethroned the planter is no despicable parvenu.
Work and wealth are the mighty levers to lift this old new land; thrift and toil and saving
are the highways to new hopes and new possibilities; and yet the warning is needed lest the wily
Hippomenes tempt Atalanta to thinking that golden apples are the goal of racing, and
not mere incidents by the way. Atlanta must not lead the South to dream of
material prosperity as the touchstone of all success; already the fatal might of this idea
is beginning to spread; it is replacing the finer type of Southerner with vulgar money-getters;
it is burying the sweeter beauties of Southern life beneath pretence and ostentation.
For every social ill the panacea of Wealth has been urged,—wealth to overthrow the
remains of the slave feudalism; wealth to raise the "cracker" Third Estate; wealth to
employ the black serfs, and the prospect of wealth to keep them working; wealth as the
end and aim of politics, and as the legal tender for law and order; and, finally, instead
of Truth, Beauty, and Goodness, wealth as the ideal of the Public School.
Not only is this true in the world which Atlanta typifies, but it is threatening to be true
of a world beneath and beyond that world,—the Black World beyond the Veil.
Today it makes little difference to Atlanta, to the South, what the *** thinks or dreams
or wills. In the soul-life of the land he is to-day,
and naturally will long remain, unthought of, half forgotten; and yet when he does come
to think and will and do for himself,—and let no man dream that day will never come,—then
the part he plays will not be one of sudden learning, but words and thoughts he has been
taught to lisp in his race-childhood. To-day the ferment of his striving toward self-realization
is to the strife of the white world like a wheel within a wheel: beyond the Veil are
smaller but like problems of ideals, of leaders and the led, of serfdom, of poverty, of order
and subordination, and, through all, the Veil of Race.
Few know of these problems, few who know notice them; and yet there they are, awaiting student,
artist, and seer,—a field for somebody sometime to discover.
Hither has the temptation of Hippomenes penetrated; already in this smaller world, which now indirectly
and anon directly must influence the larger for good or ill, the habit is forming of interpreting
the world in dollars. The old leaders of *** opinion, in the little
groups where there is a *** social consciousness, are being replaced by new; neither the black
preacher nor the black teacher leads as he did two decades ago.
Into their places are pushing the farmers and gardeners, the well-paid porters and artisans,
the business-men,—all those with property and money.
And with all this change, so curiously parallel to that of the Other-world, goes too the same
inevitable change in ideals. The South laments to-day the slow, steady
disappearance of a certain type of ***,—the faithful, courteous slave of other days, with
his incorruptible honesty and dignified humility. He is passing away just as surely as the old
type of Southern gentleman is passing, and from not dissimilar causes,—the sudden transformation
of a fair far-off ideal of Freedom into the hard reality of bread-winning and the consequent
deification of Bread. In the Black World, the Preacher and Teacher
embodied once the ideals of this people—the strife for another and a juster world, the
vague dream of righteousness, the mystery of knowing; but to-day the danger is that
these ideals, with their simple beauty and weird inspiration, will suddenly sink to a
question of cash and a *** for gold. Here stands this black young Atalanta, girding
herself for the race that must be run; and if her eyes be still toward the hills and
sky as in the days of old, then we may look for noble running; but what if some ruthless
or wily or even thoughtless Hippomenes lay golden apples before her?
What if the *** people be wooed from a strife for righteousness, from a love of knowing,
to regard dollars as the be-all and end-all of life?
What if to the Mammonism of America be added the rising Mammonism of the re-born South,
and the Mammonism of this South be reinforced by the budding Mammonism of its half-wakened
black millions? Whither, then, is the new-world quest of Goodness
and Beauty and Truth gone glimmering? Must this, and that fair flower of Freedom
which, despite the jeers of latter-day striplings, sprung from our fathers' blood, must that
too degenerate into a dusty quest of gold,—into lawless *** with Hippomenes?
The hundred hills of Atlanta are not all crowned with factories.
On one, toward the west, the setting sun throws three buildings in bold relief against the
sky. The beauty of the group lies in its simple
unity:—a broad lawn of green rising from the red street and mingled roses and peaches;
north and south, two plain and stately halls; and in the midst, half hidden in ivy, a larger
building, boldly graceful, sparingly decorated, and with one low spire.
It is a restful group, —one never looks for more; it is all here, all intelligible.
There I live, and there I hear from day to day the low hum of restful life.
In winter's twilight, when the red sun glows, I can see the dark figures pass between the
halls to the music of the night-bell. In the morning, when the sun is golden, the
clang of the day-bell brings the hurry and laughter of three hundred young hearts from
hall and street, and from the busy city below,—children all dark and heavy-haired,—to join their
clear young voices in the music of the morning sacrifice.
In a half-dozen class-rooms they gather then,—here to follow the love-song of Dido, here to listen
to the tale of Troy divine; there to wander among the stars, there to wander among men
and nations,—and elsewhere other well-worn ways of knowing this *** world.
Nothing new, no time-saving devices,—simply old time-glorified methods of delving for
Truth, and searching out the hidden beauties of life, and learning the good of living.
The riddle of existence is the college curriculum that was laid before the Pharaohs, that was
taught in the groves by Plato, that formed the trivium and quadrivium, and is to-day
laid before the freedmen's sons by Atlanta University.
And this course of study will not change; its methods will grow more deft and effectual,
its content richer by toil of scholar and sight of seer; but the true college will ever
have one goal,—not to earn meat, but to know the end and aim of that life which meat
nourishes. The vision of life that rises before these
dark eyes has in it nothing mean or selfish. Not at Oxford or at Leipsic, not at Yale or
Columbia, is there an air of higher resolve or more unfettered striving; the determination
to realize for men, both black and white, the broadest possibilities of life, to seek
the better and the best, to spread with their own hands the Gospel of Sacrifice,—all this
is the burden of their talk and dream. Here, amid a wide desert of caste and proscription,
amid the heart-hurting slights and jars and vagaries of a deep race-dislike, lies this
green oasis, where hot anger cools, and the bitterness of disappointment is sweetened
by the springs and breezes of Parnassus; and here men may lie and listen, and learn of
a future fuller than the past, and hear the voice of Time:
"Entbehren sollst du, sollst entbehren." They made their mistakes, those who planted
Fisk and Howard and Atlanta before the smoke of battle had lifted; they made their mistakes,
but those mistakes were not the things at which we lately laughed somewhat uproariously.
They were right when they sought to found a new educational system upon the University:
where, forsooth, shall we ground knowledge save on the broadest and deepest knowledge?
The roots of the tree, rather than the leaves, are the sources of its life; and from the
dawn of history, from Academus to Cambridge, the culture of the University has been the
broad foundation-stone on which is built the kindergarten's A B C.
But these builders did make a mistake in minimizing the gravity of the problem before them; in
thinking it a matter of years and decades; in therefore building quickly and laying their
foundation carelessly, and lowering the standard of knowing, until they had scattered haphazard
through the South some dozen poorly equipped high schools and miscalled them universities.
They forgot, too, just as their successors are forgetting, the rule of inequality:—that
of the million black youth, some were fitted to know and some to dig; that some had the
talent and capacity of university men, and some the talent and capacity of blacksmiths;
and that true training meant neither that all should be college men nor all artisans,
but that the one should be made a missionary of culture to an untaught people, and the
other a free workman among serfs. And to seek to make the blacksmith a scholar
is almost as silly as the more modern scheme of making the scholar a blacksmith; almost,
but not quite. The function of the university is not simply
to teach bread-winning, or to furnish teachers for the public schools or to be a centre of
polite society; it is, above all, to be the organ of that fine adjustment between real
life and the growing knowledge of life, an adjustment which forms the secret of civilization.
Such an institution the South of to-day sorely needs.
She has religion, earnest, bigoted:—religion that on both sides the Veil often omits the
sixth, seventh, and eighth commandments, but substitutes a dozen supplementary ones.
She has, as Atlanta shows, growing thrift and love of toil; but she lacks that broad
knowledge of what the world knows and knew of human living and doing, which she may apply
to the thousand problems of real life to-day confronting her.
The need of the South is knowledge and culture,—not in dainty limited quantity, as before the
war, but in broad busy abundance in the world of work; and until she has this, not all the
Apples of Hesperides, be they golden and bejewelled, can save her from the curse of the Boeotian
lovers. The Wings of Atalanta are the coming universities
of the South. They alone can bear the maiden past the temptation
of golden fruit. They will not guide her flying feet away from
the cotton and gold; for—ah, thoughtful Hippomenes!—do not the apples lie in the
very Way of Life? But they will guide her over and beyond them, and leave her kneeling
in the Sanctuary of Truth and Freedom and broad Humanity, *** and undefiled.
Sadly did the Old South err in human education, despising the education of the masses, and
niggardly in the support of colleges. Her ancient university foundations dwindled and
withered under the foul breath of slavery; and even since the war they have fought a
failing fight for life in the tainted air of social unrest and commercial selfishness,
stunted by the death of criticism, and starving for lack of broadly cultured men.
And if this is the white South's need and danger, how much heavier the danger and need
of the freedmen's sons! how pressing here the need of broad ideals and true culture,
the conservation of soul from sordid aims and petty passions!
Let us build the Southern university—William and Mary, Trinity, Georgia, Texas, Tulane,
Vanderbilt, and the others—fit to live; let us build, too, the *** universities:—Fisk,
whose foundation was ever broad; Howard, at the heart of the Nation; Atlanta at Atlanta,
whose ideal of scholarship has been held above the temptation of numbers.
Why not here, and perhaps elsewhere, plant deeply and for all time centres of learning
and living, colleges that yearly would send into the life of the South a few white men
and a few black men of broad culture, catholic tolerance, and trained ability, joining their
hands to other hands, and giving to this squabble of the Races a decent and dignified peace?
Patience, Humility, Manners, and Taste, common schools and kindergartens, industrial and
technical schools, literature and tolerance,—all these spring from knowledge and culture, the
children of the university. So must men and nations build, not otherwise,
not upside down. Teach workers to work,—a wise saying; wise
when applied to German boys and American girls; wiser when said of *** boys, for they have
less knowledge of working and none to teach them.
Teach thinkers to think,—a needed knowledge in a day of loose and careless logic; and
they whose lot is gravest must have the carefulest training to think aright.
If these things are so, how foolish to ask what is the best education for one or seven
or sixty million souls! shall we teach them trades, or train them in liberal arts?
Neither and both: teach the workers to work and the thinkers to think; make carpenters
of carpenters, and philosophers of philosophers, and fops of fools.
Nor can we pause here. We are training not isolated men but a living
group of men,—nay, a group within a group. And the final product of our training must
be neither a psychologist nor a brickmason, but a man. And to make men, we must have ideals,
broad, pure, and inspiring ends of living,—not sordid money-getting, not apples of gold.
The worker must work for the glory of his handiwork, not simply for pay; the thinker
must think for truth, not for fame. And all this is gained only by human strife
and longing; by ceaseless training and education; by founding Right on righteousness and Truth
on the unhampered search for Truth; by founding the common school on the university, and the
industrial school on the common school; and weaving thus a system, not a distortion, and
bringing a birth, not an abortion. When night falls on the City of a Hundred
Hills, a wind gathers itself from the seas and comes murmuring westward.
And at its bidding, the smoke of the drowsy factories sweeps down upon the mighty city
and covers it like a pall, while yonder at the University the stars twinkle above Stone
Hall. And they say that yon gray mist is the tunic
of Atalanta pausing over her golden apples. Fly, my maiden, fly, for yonder comes Hippomenes!
End of Chapter V