Wanted—Leaders!

The importation of Negroes to the American mainland began about 1525, following the license for such traffic by Philip of Spain. From that time, through Spanish and French companies chiefly; and after the Spanish Armada, through English companies chiefly, the trade in African slaves was vigorously pursued. While statistics are unreliable, Stone approves the guess that “the number transported to Spanish America may be said to have been somewhere between four and seven millions; for English America, insular and continental, about three millions during the century preceding the Revolution. The number brought into the Thirteen Colonies may have been about three hundred thousand.”

The first slaves (about twenty in number) were brought to our colonies by a Dutch vessel which landed at Portsmouth, Va., in 1619, just twelve years after the first permanent settlement by the English. This we have upon the authority of John Rolfe. Thus the Negroes, though not of their own wills, were among the first settlers of the new country. It is vain to discuss the question of responsibility, or of moral culpability. However revolting to the modern mind and heart, slavery was the inheritance of our forefathers, practiced in every conceivable form, not only in Africa, but among every people and in every land. When practiced within racial lines, it extended all the way from the kindly, household slave relations of the Romans, where slaves were sometimes the teachers of their masters’ children, to the relations with war-trophies to be sold or exploited as chattels. When practiced inter-racially, the differences of race were apt to harden into prejudice with its general indifference to the consequences of cruelty. But in either case, it was the universal practice of heathen and Christian peoples until a comparatively recent time. Moral culpability did not enter into the reckoning of the ages preceding ours, and responsibility was readily admitted or never questioned. And this was true of our colonist forefathers who carried on the slave traffic as sellers and buyers in the early days. Even after the consciousness of the wrong of it had been awakened in many by the experiences of slavery, they found themselves the victims of a system of social life which they would gladly have escaped. This is equally true of the southern and the northern colonists.

It was because of the rapid growth of this consciousness of the wrong of slavery, naturally quickened by the advance of Democracy during the eighteenth century, that the traffic was made illegal in 1807. It was also because so large and so respectable a number of slave-holders realized themselves to be the victims of an inherited system of social life from which they could find no satisfactory means of escape, that the system took more and more the form of humane feudalism in which, however, the vassals were workers and not soldiers to be protected and not exposed to danger. And when Emancipation came, there were not a few who felt and expressed it. “It is not the Negroes who are emancipated, but the Whites; only we cannot realize it until the last of our old people are gone.” And this was true, for the Negro had yet to learn the art of freedom and acquire its character before it could become the reality as well as the blessing it should be. True, too, that the white man was not yet emancipated, for he had still to fulfil the obligation to his old people, many of them children as yet in development, loving and beloved; and this, in many cases, he did to the last dollar and to the last dust of meal, and to the last old servant laid to rest.

No one, except perhaps the political economist here or there, or some fond soul of the olden time who has been asleep ever since, will attempt to defend slavery; yet it is also difficult to understand the philosopher, North or South, White or Negro who attaches nothing but obloquy to it, and sees nothing that is good resulting from it. Doctor Murphy’s opening chapter of The Basis of Ascendency begins with this true assertion: “It is so frequently assumed that the most significant factor in the history of our negro population is the factor of its exploitation, that a word of contradiction is never quite out of place. Within its actual environment, whether North or South, this population has suffered much, but it has received more.” And emphasizing the inevitable co-partnership of the two races in the task of progress which the White alone has been responsible for forming, he adds: “It (the negro population) has become involved so inextricably in the fate of a far more efficient social group, that the conditions of progress within this stronger group have become the conditions which must surround and advance the life and fortunes of the weaker.”

Dr. Booker T. Washington is never an apologist for negro slavery, but he recognizes a large fact when he sees, side by side with “the great curse (of slavery) to both races,” this evident shaping of its ends. “God, for two hundred and fifty years, in my opinion, prepared the way for the redemption of the Negro through industrial development.” It is the story of this redemption that must now occupy our interest.

Our first chapter sought to draw the picture of the Negro in Africa. We then saw him as he has developed under conditions of more or less segregation and self-government. Now we are to trace his development under American conditions, described by visiting students of slavery as the most kindly and humane ever experienced in such relations. Thus the Englishman, Welby, wrote in 1820: “After traveling through three Slave States, I am obliged to go back to the theory to raise any abhorrence of it. Not once during the journey did I witness an instance of cruel treatment, nor could I discover anything to excite commiseration in the faces or gait of the people of color. They walk, talk, and appear, at least, as independent as their masters; in animal spirits they have greatly the advantage.”

Again, Basil Hall wrote, in 1828: “I have no wish, God knows! to defend slavery in the abstract; ... but ... nothing during my recent journey gave me more satisfaction than the conclusion to which I was gradually brought that the planters of the Southern States of America, generally speaking, have a sincere desire to manage their estates with the least possible severity. I do not say that undue severity is nowhere exercised; but the discipline taken upon the average, as far as I could learn, is not more strict than is necessary for the maintenance of a proper degree of authority, without which the whole framework of society in that quarter would be blown to atoms.”

Human nature is much the same the world over, and this display of kindly humanitarianism, so noticeable to the traveling students, was probably but the outgrowth of the early conditions of colonial life. The settlers in a new land were beset with the problem of labor to develop the new homesteads. English freemen would rarely engage themselves for such wages as employers could afford to pay. What more natural than that the laborers in England, willing and often anxious to emigrate to the new land, should sell themselves for a period of labor sufficient to pay passage, including a meagre wage while the servitude lasted. Thus indentured servitude for the Colonies took the place of the old system of apprenticeship so long in use in the Old Country.

When negro slaves came in increasing numbers, the former relation with indentured servants must certainly have entered, more or less, into the interpretation of the relations of permanent servitude. Add to this that all alike were surrounded with the possible, and often aroused enmity of the Red Men, and with a constant peril of life, we have factors which must greatly have strengthened and softened the bond between White and Negro. In these and in many other conditions of the earlier days of the settlements, one sees the conditions out of which kindliness and affection were well-nigh certain to grow, and the well-recognized mutual partnership of interests to develop.

And this is just what actually happened for the most part. The growing sense of the mutual interest and dependence, and responsibility constantly tended to develop a relationship similar to that of the old patriarchate. The constant battle with the primeval forest and undeveloped new lands—a battle to be waged successfully only by the importation of laborers, untaught and undisciplined—constantly tended also to develop the relation of the teacher and the taught in the larger School of Nature. So the system grew into the Family and the Trade School.

Let us dismiss, with one paragraph, that other unsightly, often cruel, always condemnable side of slavery—the unfeeling, ruthlessly selfish and contemptible business of the slave-trader, who sought only to fill his purse with gold through the sale of “human cattle”—that unspeakably loathsome estimate of the Negro as an animal whose relationships were ignored, whose love was ridiculed, whose sensibilities were despised and whose rights (for the rights were there, even though the rights of a slave) were denied. Slavery did, in some instances, present that aspect; but no one can read the story without knowing that that side was the horrid incident, and not the characteristic of the old feudal and patriarchal life. It was that feature which often hindered the development, upon the best lines, of the rude Negroes brought from Africa. It could not, however, stop it. Our purpose being to trace this development, we are led into pleasanter fields; for it is in the inner life of the White-Black family and school, that the story of the culture of the wild graft is written.

Professor Phillips, in his American Negro Slavery, tells us that during the first half century after the introduction of slaves there were comparatively few Negroes in the colony—Virginia—which received the first importations. “They had,” he writes, “by far the best opportunity which any of their race had been given in America, to learn the white man’s ways and to adjust the lines of their bondage into as pleasant places as might be. Their importation was, for the time, on but an experimental scale, and even their legal status was, during the early decades, indefinite.”

There was, as yet, neither law nor custom establishing slavery as an institution. In fact it was custom that established the status of permanent servitude, while the laws only recognized it in defining the difference between the white indentured servant and the negro purchased slave. This did not become a subject of legal enactment until 1662. Prior to that time, Negroes were described as servants: “A few as servants for terms of years; some were conceded, property rights of a sort incompatible with the institution of slavery as elaborated in later times. Some of the blacks were liberated by the courts, as having served the terms fixed by their indentures or by the custom of the country.” How much of trouble and distress would have been saved had the forefathers developed their slave problems after this precedent, rather than after that of their Spanish and English neighbors of the South Atlantic Islands!

Some of the Negroes had become landowners by the middle of the century, and some were themselves slave owners. More and more, however, the owners of Negroes were holding them tenaciously, and regarding them as salable property; and from, 1680 onward, the laws for slave control became as definite as those in the Islands.

The charter and later settlement of the South Carolina Colony, in 1663, by Sir John Colleton of Barbadoes and his company, for the purpose of attracting colonists from the English Islands, fixed the general legal status of slavery upon the American Colonies. This was made the more sure because in the first-settled coast regions of the colony, rice, and later indigo, were introduced as the staple crops, for the cultivation of which only Negroes could endure the necessary swampy conditions. The owners, dwelling in the neighboring pine elevations by night and in summer, went to their plantations only in the day time and in the winter season.

Likewise, in the Northern Colonies, without exception, the system found its way; first, through the enslaving of captive Indians, then, by 1630, of Negroes also. While the traffic in slaves persisted for a long time with Newport as the chief center, neither climatic nor economic conditions were favorable to the system. In one way or another, slavery declined, and the field presents little that is valuable to our study.

The Revolutionary War, with the Declaration of Independence, and its assertion of the freedom and equality of men as its justifying principle and motive, produced a profound effect upon the mind of America; not, indeed, sufficiently great to enable any State to enact laws looking to gradual emancipation, but great enough to arouse most of the Northern States and all of the Southern, except Georgia, to prohibit, by the year 1787, the further importation of slaves from beyond their borders. The Federal Congress was still, however, inhibited for twenty years, from enacting such laws.

The action of the State tended to stabilize social life, by reducing the number of strange Negroes from across the ocean; and to strengthen the ties of masters and servants, by prolonged association. The result was well-nigh universal in the Slave States in spite of South Carolina’s repeal of its law, four years before the Federal Act was passed at the close of 1807. Meanwhile the introduction of cotton, in about 1790 as the chief crop of these States, proved to be the greatest material factor in determining the social and industrial life of the Eastern and Southern States, especially the latter. Once firmly established, following Whitney’s invention of the cotton gin in 1793, it almost as firmly established the life of the Negro in his agricultural home.

The Louisiana Purchase, in 1803, and the expansion of sugar-planting on a large scale, completed, for many generations, the cycle of Southern agricultural industry. Since then, much has happened; but agriculturally the Negro’s home is practically unchanged and his development has been through a stable school of arts which ministered to his rural life.

The pupils, we must bear in mind, came from many tribes of Africans. Professor John McCrady, in the course of a lecture to his students in Sewanee, said that he had clearly defined fourteen different dialects spoken by the Negroes of the Sea Islands of South Carolina, and did not doubt but that many more could be found by the student of the Southern Negro. Not only were the dialects different, but quite marked were the physical and mental characteristics. It is a mistake to imagine that all Negroes are alike. The pupils of the plantation school came to be known and rated personally just as the pupils of any school must be; and so, too, the children of the large patriarchal family.

The character of the plantation school was determined, partly by the crops raised, partly by the nature of the land, partly by the personality of the master and his foreman, partly by the number of workers, and partly by the neighborhood customs. Some neighborhoods operated on the gang system, dividing the workers into groups; others on the task system, allotting so much as the labor of the day; while still others used successfully both systems, often the former for men, the latter for women and younger learners.

If the owner had but one or half a dozen families of servants he usually labored with them at plough, or hoe, or wagon. If a greater number, his time was fully occupied in planning the work, and overseeing the workers. If the plantations were very large, the organization was elaborate and complete. In every case, to the Negro, as he came new from his African home and for long after, the school was most valuable and every day brought lessons to body, mind and soul. As the great majority of the old servants were congregated on the larger plantations, it was there that most of the training was received. Should the reader have access to one of a number of books like A Southern Planter, by Mrs. S. D. Smedes, the reading will be most delightful and not less instructive in its exact picture of the old régime. Or if a visit could be paid to Alfred Holt Stone’s Dunleith Plantation (a very fine sample of many like it) in Washington County, Mississippi, there would be seen a perfect likeness of the old life, under the much improved conditions (in many respects) of free labor. For all that was best in the old régime, the mutual interest, the personal attachments, the mutual confidence, the pride in home, the loyalty and friendship between master and servant, has been preserved in the descendants of both. The statement just made and that which follows have been tested all over the South, and never found wanting whenever the two races are still found in the old homes. There never has been a place or time when there were more Christian Whites and Christian Negroes more earnestly interested in forming and keeping the highest and best race-relations, and in seeking the best interests of both races alike, than in the South at this present time. Unfortunately, they are not all Christians who call the name of Christ.

The organization of a large plantation had to be very perfect if it was to succeed in maintaining its great family. Phillips’ American Slavery presents many samples and, with minute detail, describes the routine, interesting but not necessary to our study. One type will sufficiently illustrate the educative value of all.

The division into crafts was essential where the plantation represented a community well-nigh completely self-sustaining. There was the agricultural department, so ordered as to provide the right proportion of plowmen and hoe-hands, each with its foreman. In every case the foreman or head-man was a Negro of marked ability as a workman and leader, who was not a mere driver but a teacher. Generally he exacted the task and demanded that it be well done. Often he got what he wanted by tactful resource and consummate human wisdom, as one of them expressed it, “I never discouraged, but him that was hindmost I praised the most.” His leadership involved every detail, both of prompt and well-done service, and of the care of the tools; in the case of the plowman, the proper care of the livestock and its management. There were the carpenter shops, where all the wood-work was done; with the house carpenter, sometimes the cabinetmaker, and always the toolmaker for the wood-work of plows, wagons, etc. Often, in the beginning, they had been taught by white experts fresh from their apprenticeships in England or Ireland. They understood the care and seasoning of timbers and lumber, from the cutting in the forest to the sawing and shaping in the shop. Under them there were often one or more young apprentices who had shown aptitude. The system, the exactness, the careful planning that no want should be unsupplied when needed; the care to be ready for instant repairs that other departments might not be delayed—all of this was entrusted to the head of each department of carpentry, who was a man to be trusted and relied upon; and the master, with mind always busy looking forward and eyes seeing everything, knew it, as in kindly confidential contact, he rather suggested and counselled than ordered. Here is a little extract from a colloquy once heard in a very busy time.

“Uncle Ned, where are those plow stocks? Didn’t I tell you we would need them tomorrow”?

“Marse John, who is making dese plows? Don’t I know when dey is needed”?

And with a chuckle, Marse John receives the retort of offended dignity, and beats a retreat, having seen the various parts of the plows, stacked in order, ready to be assembled in a trifle of time, and proud of the old reliable.

There was the blacksmith’s shop, where everything was made, from a nail to a lock and key, from a plow-shovel to a wagon-axle and spindle, from a bridle-pit to steel stirrups. Gradually these were replaced by manufactured articles; but to the last, any might be repaired or replaced if necessity required.

The women had their tasks. There were the hoe-hands—women, boys, and girls—to be taught under easy, short tasks, but with the care always required by their foreman. There was the weave-room, where cotton and wool were spun and woven into cloth for home use. The dyeing was done at home. There was the sewing-room where, under the oversight of the mistress, clothing in proper quantity was cut and made for “top and bottom” wear. There was the day nursery where the young mothers, busied with the half tasks allotted them, left their little ones under the care of the older experienced women who, under the mistress, were at times nurses, and at other times mid-wives.

Some plantations also had “the sick house” for severe cases; but, in most cases, the sick were at home, visited regularly by master or mistress or both, and by the family doctor where his attention was needed. The last was often distant, and the master and mistress were generally good substitutes, always supplied with simple remedies. The day-nursery provided the opportunity for instruction in baby-farming, which many a mistress used to great advantage. For instruction in domestic service, the “Big House” was the school, and none better. A southern negro boy would as soon have been disrespectful to his father as “sassed” the dignified butler; a punishment would even more certainly have followed the latter, if known. And the relation of love between children and “Mammy,” and between family and servants, is too charmingly commonplace to remark.

Dr. Washington, writing of God’s hand in it all, says: “First, He made the southern white man do business with the Negro for 250 years in a way that no one else has done business with him. If a southern white man wanted a house or a bridge built, he consulted a negro mechanic about the plan and the actual building of the house or bridge. If he wanted a suit of clothes or a pair of shoes made, it was to the negro tailor or shoemaker that he talked. Secondly, every large plantation in the South was, in a limited way, an industrial school. On these plantations, there were scores of young colored men and women who were constantly being trained, not only as common farmers, but as carpenters, blacksmiths, wheelwrights, plasterers, brickmasons, engineers, bridge-builders, cooks, dress-makers, housekeepers, etc. I would be the last to apologize for the curse of slavery; but I am simply stating facts. This training was crude and was given for selfish purposes; and did not answer the highest needs, because there was the absence of brain-training in connection with that of the hand.”

It is good to have the Negro speak for himself. The last sentence would have been written differently by his white friend. Though given for selfish purposes in part, the training was definitely also for the good of the pupil; and while often crude, it was more often very definitely expert. Some of the more skilled workers, in every generation of the slavery days and in spite of adverse laws, were taught to read and cipher; they drew their plans, estimated their materials, and made their own calculations for the work in hand. Yet it is also true that the laws against school-training, though never fully obeyed, vastly hindered the general development of the race.

One other important division of farm economics should be mentioned, i. e., the food supply, involving the raising of cattle, hogs and poultry; the cure of meats; the storage of grain and vegetables, etc. In all this there were plantation experts, as well as happy joyous faces and overfed bodies at “hog-killin’ times.” In practically all cases, Saturday was half-holiday, often utilized by the slaves in their home-gardens or in other work yielding money to be spent at their own pleasure. Poultry and eggs, the weaving of baskets or other articles, were other sources of income. Not infrequently the Negroes continued the crafts native to their tribes in Africa.

The houses of the servants, while far beyond those left behind in the “Dark Continent,” and comfortable for the most part, were certainly not the sort in which a high moral life could be taught. Consisting often of only two rooms, sometimes three, the problem of sleeping-quarters in them seemed a secondary consideration. And while few planters of the olden days would admit less than a real interest in the morals of their servants, practically none provided the means of safeguarding them properly in the homes furnished. Yet it must be said that these quarters were generally better than those which the Negroes have provided for themselves “since freedom.”

We turn now to the old plantation as the patriarchal family, with its valuable educative features in moral training and home-making. “The Big House” was the name given by the Negroes to the master’s home, whether a log house or a stately mansion. The servants’ quarters on the large plantation were often in the form of a village, with its streets, one or many, as the inhabitants required. Each house had its garden, its “hen-house,” and generally its pig-sty; with its fruit trees, serving both for shade and for food. Other features of the village, the day nursery, etc.—have been mentioned. The system of life was co-operative. With the exception of the garden truck, the supplies came from the plantation storehouses and the flocks and herds. Fish from the nearby streams, wild game, and native fruits of field and forest, furnished additional food for all alike.

“The lives of Whites and Blacks,” as Professor Phillips writes, “were partly segregate, partly intertwined. If any special links were needed, the children supplied them. The white ones, hardly knowing their mothers from their ‘mammies’ or their uncles by blood from their ‘uncles’ by courtesy, had the freedom of the kitchen and the cabins; and the black ones were their playmates in the shaded, sunny yard, the livelong day. Together they were regaled with folklore in the quarters; with the Bible and fairy stories in the “Big House”; with pastry in the kitchen; with grapes at the scuppernong vineyard; with melons at the spring-house; and with peaches in the orchard. The half-grown boys were likewise as undiscriminating among themselves as the dogs with which they chased rabbits by day and ’possums by night. Indeed, when the fork in the road of life was reached, the white youths found something to envy in the freedom of their fellows’ feet from the cramping weight of shoes, and the freedom of their minds from the restraints of school. With the approach of maturity, came routine and responsibility for the whites; routine alone for the generality of the blacks. Some of the males of each race grew into ruffians, others into gentlemen in the literal sense; some of the females into viragoes, others into gentlewomen; but most of both races and sexes merely became plain, wholesome folk of a somewhat distinctive plantation type.

In amusements there was the same mingling and separation. Never a fox-hunt or a rabbit-chase, but some bell-voiced Negroes were on hand to “whoop-up the dogs,” and, with canny knowledge of the habits of wild things, to guide the hunters, dogs and humans, to likely lairs. Something like this was true of every outdoor sport. If the Negroes gave a dance, the White were there to look on and applaud. If there was a festivity at the “Big House,” there were sure to be some favorites from the quarters to see and help. Who, that has heard them, can ever forget the impromptu concerts swelling up from the quarters on moonlight nights? Starting often with a single voice from the stoop of a cabin, and traveling from house to house, until the combined voices swelled upward and outward as a great, exquisite organ filling all space—it was, in very truth, a human organ of God’s fashioning. The memory brings melody.

Every step by the way was development from the savagery, often cannibalism, of African inheritance, to the awakening kindliness due to others, and the reverence for life as such. There were quarreling and fighting to be prevented or stopped. Punishment was often inflicted for such outbreaks. In some cases, the masters resorted to athletics as both a training in self-control and a means of working off surplus energy. Wrestling, boxing, racing and the like were practiced under the eye of the master, who acted as judge of the contest, and knew how to teach the contestants to compose ruffled feelings. Whether at work or at play, the old system was a school of training, under average conditions worth while; under the best conditions most valuable.

Some of the tribes of Africa had already developed agriculture to a degree. The American life immeasurably improved both method and purpose. And what a wholly new conception of family and social life was born in them! Polygamy had been too universally fashionable in the old land to admit the ties of family. No fondling there of little ones, no rejoicing in the growing lives; only the interest in the chattel, to be sold if the child be a girl, if a boy, all ties gone with the mother’s dried breast.

But, in the new life, love, long starved, re-awakened in tremendous force. High human emotions were developed, released and expanded under ever increasing kindly relations, growing more and more into affectionate attachment which was tried by shot and shell, by hunger and thirst, and not found wanting. This a South Carolinian wrote in 1852, a few years before the testing time of war: “Experience and observation fully satisfy me that the first law of slavery is that of kindness from master to slave. With that ... slavery becomes a family relation, next, in its attachments, to that of parent and child.” The Negro did not write that—not many could—; but nearly all learned to live it.

Conditions differing from those of the Negro in slavery existed, even during the period of slavery, among a constantly growing number of free Negroes who formed a distinct class both North and South. While a very few free Negroes came into the colonies from the Islands, and, in the early period, a larger number at the expiration of the indentured service, this class was formed either by the purchase of themselves by the Negroes, or through their manumission by generous or grateful masters. Typical of the first, is “the deed signed by Robert Daniell of South Carolina, in 1759, granting freedom to his slave, David Wilson, in consideration of his faithful service, and of £600 currency in hand paid.” Illustrative of the second, is “the will of Thomas Stanford of New Jersey, in 1722, directing that, upon the death of the testator’s wife, his negro man should have his freedom if, in the opinion of three neighbors named, he had behaved well.”

It is to be noted, too, that the democratic philosophy of the Revolutionary period, inevitably and immediately producing the abolition movement, stimulated very greatly private manumissions throughout the colonies, which persisted, in spite of reaction, to the very end of slavery. Thus Philip Graham, of Maryland, made a deed in 1787, by which his slaves were converted into servants for terms, and in which he recited, as the reason, his conviction that “the holding of his fellowmen in bondage and slavery is repugnant to the golden law of God and the inalienable right of mankind, as well as to every principle of the late glorious revolution which has taken place in America.” About the same time, Richard Randolph, of the Roanoke family, wrote to his guardian, “With regard to the division of the estate, I want only to say that I want not a single Negro for other purpose than his immediate liberation. I consider every individual thus unshackled as the source of future generations, not to say nations, of freemen; and I shudder when I think that so insignificant an animal as I am is invested with this monstrous, this horrid power.”

So many were the manumissions of which these are typical, that, by 1790, there were more than 35,000 freedmen in the South. And while the reasons assigned were changed in the Nineteenth Century, liberations on a large scale were made. A unique sample was that of John McDonogh, the most thrifty citizen of New Orleans in his day, who made a bargain with his whole force of slaves, about 1825, by which they were collectively to earn their freedom and their passage to Liberia by their overtime work on Saturday afternoons. This labor was to be done in McDonogh’s own service, and he was to keep account of their earnings. They were entitled to draw upon this fund upon approved occasions; but, since the contract was with the whole group of slaves as a unit, when one applied for cash, the others must draw theirs pro rata, thereby postponing the common day of liberation. Any slaves violating the rules of good conduct were to be sold by the master, whereupon their accrued earnings would revert to the fund of the rest. The plan was carried to completion on schedule; and, after some delay in embarkation, they left America in 1842, some eighty in number, with their late master’s benediction. In concluding his public narration, McDonogh wrote: “They have now sailed for Liberia, the land of their fathers. I can say with truth and heartfelt satisfaction that a more virtuous people does not exist in any country.”

There were also not a few families of Virginia and South Carolina who, though not without difficulties, colonized their Negroes in Ohio, and themselves, in some cases, began life afresh as pioneers in a new country.

Sometimes the liberations were attended with romance, as, when Pierre Chastang, of Mobile, was bought and freed by popular subscription in recognition of public services in the war of 1812 and in the yellow fever epidemic of 1819. Another outstanding figure was Sam whose freedom was bought in reward for his saving the State Capitol from burning, the Georgia Legislature providing $1800 by a special act for this purpose. Negroes freed for meritorious service, and those buying their own freedom, became ensamples of substantial worth to the free population.

Among these freedmen there were some notable figures who, for one cause or another, were highly esteemed in the locality in which they lived. Just two examples must suffice. “In Georgia, the most notable was Austin Dabney, who, as a mulatto youth, served in the revolutionary army and attached himself ever after to the white family who saved his life when he was wounded in battle. The Georgia legislature, by special act, gave him a farm; he was welcomed in the tavern circle of chatting lawyers whenever his favorite, Judge Dooly, held court in his home village; and once, when the formality of drawing his pension carried him to Savannah, the Governor of the State, seeing him pass, invited him as a guest in his house.

In 1792, a Negro named Caesar, noted for his knowledge of curative herbs, was liberated by purchase, the Assembly of South Carolina voting the funds and, in addition, an annuity for life.

Thus, by purchase, manumission and natural growth, the 35,000 free Negroes of 1790 grew to approximately a half million in 1860—about equally divided between the North and the South. The chief concentration was in the border States, the number rapidly decreasing with increasing distance from the middle line. The climate and the industrial repression in the far North were alike unwholesome to this class; and the suspicion and stringent laws in the far South about as much so. In both cases the Whites had the upper hand, and in both cases they used their power after their own wills.

The lot of the freedmen was, indeed, a difficult one to bear. The philosophy of the Negro, and the habit of association, were certainly chief elements in the preservation of peace to a remarkable degree. The well-to-do had their property at stake; the large majority of day laborers, the unprosperous and inert, were satisfied simply to be free. It was the smaller class, within the class, who represented the progressive freedmen, the forerunners and prophets of the after-war leaders and seers of the race. For these forerunners had already, in their day, entered every large field of endeavor which engages the race of today.

Among the Churches, in the North, with few exceptions, the freedman was driven to form his own organizations; while, in the South, he was encouraged to adopt the churches of the Whites; indeed, in the South, few separate churches were provided by any denominations.

Among the fraternal organizations, he had none in the South in common with the Whites; while, in the North, the Masons and Odd Fellows were introduced, the latter through a negro initiate who had been received in England. This most natural and important feature of negro social life was, for the most part, supplied by their own secret societies. These were very numerous all over the land, as they are at this day. It is quite impossible to get accurately at the history of these societies, so screened in secrecy. A mere glimpse may be had of their purpose through the published notes on the “Union Band Society of New Orleans,” 1860. Its motto was “Love, Union, Peace,” its officers were of both sexes. Members were pledged to obey the laws of the Lodge, and its officers were pledged to keep its secrets, to live in love and union with its members, to visit one another and the sick, to report illnesses of members, and to wear the regalia when required. The Official Mother was required to assign nurses for the sick who were looked after in every detail. Funeral expenses and the burial, in minute detail, were provided for. (We may note, parenthetically, that, while secret societies are the rule in every African tribe, it is doubtful if these had more than a remote connection with the societies in America.)

In the public schools, the negro freedmen were little regarded. In the North, generally, they were debarred from the white schools, and poorly provided with schools of their own; in the South, after 1840, education was discouraged, and, in most communities, forbidden.

The Fugitive-Slave Law bred great irregularity and injustice to the freedmen. The occasion was thus made for kidnapping the free Negroes, transporting them to distant regions where identification would be difficult, and the subsequent sale of the captives or their involuntary servitude. Societies were established, here and there, to prevent these heartrending tragedies. All the States had laws against it, and practically no failure to convict is recorded when the offender was brought to judgment. But the crime was so comparatively easy, that the wonder is, that the freedmen increased so steadily and normally.

An interesting phase of the life of the freedman is illustrated by the census of urban workers. The United States Census of 1850 gives, in parallel columns, the occupations of free colored labor, above 15 years of age, in New York and New Orleans, respectively. In the former there were 3,337, and in the latter 1,792. New York had 4 lawyers and 3 druggists, New Orleans none; the ministers were 21 to 1; the physicians, 9 to 4; merchants, 3 to 64; jewelers, 3 to 5; clerks, 7 to 61; teachers, 8 to 12. New Orleans also had 4 capitalists, 2 planters, 11 overseers, 9 grocers, and 2 collectors, while New York had none of these. New York had three times as many barbers as New Orleans, and twice as many butchers; but, while New Orleans had 355 carpenters, New York had only 12, and no masons as against 278 for New Orleans. A like proportion was shown in all the skilled trades.

In New York, one-third of the freedmen were unskilled laborers; while, in New Orleans, barely a tenth were of this class. This was due to the greater discrimination against colored labor in the North, which was true then as now. The laws in various Northern States excluded free immigrants, and discriminated against those who were already in their borders. In industrial life, they were very generally excluded from the trades. On the other hand, in the South, while the laws were even more severe, they were interpreted far more leniently, and the practice of the Whites was more kindly, with the result revealed in the Census quoted.

In view of the difficult condition of the freedman, it is remarkable that so few accepted the invitations, so widely given, to emigrate to other and free lands. The Colonization Society offered facilities to move to Liberia, beginning with 1819; the Haitien Government offered special inducement in 1824 and again in 1859, even promising free transportation and free lands to the French-speaking Negroes of Louisiana. In 1840, an Immigration Society offered free transportation to British Guiana. But few availed themselves of these opportunities, preferring the ills they suffered, along with very general security and prosperity to those they knew not of in the distant lands.

It is also remarkable that so few real uprisings against the white slave-holders should have occurred. These were generally led by the freedmen, and many are reported; but, in most cases, the reports were much like the flaring headlines of a modern newspaper, and must be attributed to the nervous dread of such possibilities. This, more than the few real happenings, led to the enactment of stringent laws; but the generally harmonious life was rewarded with very lax execution of such laws. In truth, the proportion of slave-holding, free Negroes in some localities, such as New Orleans and Charleston, too nearly approached that of the white slave-holders, to warrant a persistent suspicion of danger. In spite of all these difficulties, a few free Negroes of note, both men and women, appear in every generation.

Dr. James Derham, born a slave in Philadelphia in 1762, became the slave of a physician in New Orleans, who trained and used him as an assistant. He bought his freedom, and became the first recognized negro physician of whom there is record. “Dr. Benjamin Rush,” says the Negro Year Book, “the celebrated physician, published an account of Derham and spoke in the highest terms of his character and skill as a physician.”

Dr. Kelly Miller tells us that “the first real impetus to bring free Negroes in considerable numbers into the professional world, came from the American Colonization Society which, in the early years, flourished in the South, as well as in the North ... and undertook to prepare professional leaders of their race for the Liberian Colony.” The Society began its work about 1817, and sent teachers, trained in the South and the North alike, to the Colony established shortly after. Among these teachers were Doctors Taylor, Fleet, and DeGrasse.

A century earlier, Benjamin Banneker, born in Baltimore in 1731, was the first man in America to make a clock which struck the hours.

Phyllis Wheatley, born in Africa, and brought to Boston where she was sold to John Wheatley, and educated, wrote verses which were highly endorsed. They were published in London, and covered a variety of topics, religious and moral chiefly. To these names of Negroes who attained distinction, should be added that of Daniel A. Payne, of Baltimore, the founder of Union Seminary (consolidated in 1863 with Wilberforce University), who became a Bishop of the African Methodist Church. Others will appear in our study of the religious development of the race.

Commercially, the freedmen were not without conspicuous examples of thrift and material success. There was “John Jones, the colored proprietor of a popular hotel in Charleston, who lived in the same manner as his white patrons, accumulated property to the value of some $40,000, and maintained a reputation for high business integrity and talent.” Others there were among the free people of that city, respected and prosperous, with considerable establishments served by slaves. In New Orleans, a still larger number of wealthy colored people lived. Thomy Lafon, a merchant and money lender, was distinguished both for his wealth and philanthropy. He died about 30 years ago at the age of 82, leaving an estate valued at nearly half a million, from which many charities benefited. Unfortunately, wealth and good repute are not indissolubly united anywhere or among any people; it is therefore pleasant to recall them wedded in the person of a Negro.

Many of the freedmen were gifted in small trades, and even when laws were passed excluding them from populous slave-areas, petitions were common requesting that worthy ones might be permitted to remain. On the seaboard, boating and fishing provided, on a small scale, both a profitable and a free life for many. A few cases of large slave and land-holding appear, particularly in Louisiana. Cyprian Ricard bought at Sheriff’s Sale, in 1851, an estate in Iberville Parish, at a cost of nearly a quarter of a million dollars. “Marie Metoyer, of Nachitoches Parish, had fifty-eight slaves, and more than two thousand acres of land when she died in 1840.” There were others in Louisiana, as well as in South Carolina, Virginia and Maryland.

These conditions among the freedmen as well as the patriarchal system on the plantations had their results in the development of the race.

Along with, and under the tuition of, the pioneers of America, the Negro cleared the forests, drained the swamps, subdued the wild lands, built the homes and absorbed the civilization of the older race which he served. Here, as always, service of others was the highest service of self; for, conscious or otherwise, all service has its reaction upon the servers. What the older races got, through the long, weary, successive preparations of the ages of stone and wood and iron; of slave and feudal and chivalric and democratic eras; that, in contact with the highest form of which America was capable, the ablest and most diligent among the Negroes got through their amazing capacity for absorption and adaptability. To those who know the Negro best, this capacity for adaptation and absorption is still unbelievable; while to those who know him remotely, it is a miracle, unexplained or misconstrued. To the former—his white friends of the South through three centuries of intimate association—the difficulty is to understand what their eyes behold—a child-race of seventy years ago already producing leaders who stand among their people as clear, true ensigns of their race. To the latter—the man who knows the Negro more remotely—the miracle is explained only upon the assumption that the Negro is a Caucasian in black and not what God made him—a Negro—with his own racial characteristics, able to absorb what is best in the world, to build it unto himself and to stand before his Master and before mankind in God and self-fashioned black manhood.

The scientific professions have been entered by ever-increasing numbers and by increasingly better-trained men; by women, too, though in smaller numbers. Doctors, lawyers, inventors, chemists, scholars, editors, some worthy to rank high in their professions, and some known on both sides of the ocean, are at once the pride of their race, and the ministers to its many needs.

There were tribes in Africa, which produced men of decided artistic talent, untrained. They are represented here in the coterie of worthy sculptors and painters. All were musicians, rude doubtless in their native haunts, but always plaintive. These, too, are here, everywhere softened and sweetened in a gentler atmosphere, and in highest culture producing a black Patti, a Fish Quartette, and others of like gifts. It may not be to the credit of composer or player, but the fashionable (and abominable) rag-time music is their gift to the world. In poetry, Paul Lawrence Dunbar is universally read and sung, and there are many others almost as worthy. In fiction, a morning paper of December 14, 1921, announces the winner of the prize of the Gincourt Academy, Paris, as René Moran, a negro novelist of the Island of Martinique. America, in spite of blots, here and there, has been kind to the Negro, has given him a chance, has helped him to embrace it, has taught him much, and learned somewhat from him.