Wanted—Leaders!

We have seen the results of the patriarchal system under which the Negro lived in America during the slave era. Then, with the four long years of war, followed by the eleven (in one State fifteen) long, weary years of Reconstruction, came the day of testing of the results of the carefully built up family and trade-school training.

Regarding the war-period and the result of its testing, White and Negro alike agree. No one is better qualified to speak of it than the one Negro who knew, and who, more than any man of his day, is entitled to the credit and the honor of fashioning out of the past a new and greatly better era for his people and his country, Dr. Booker T. Washington.

He writes: “The self-control which the Negro exhibited during the war marks, it seems to me, one of the most important chapters in the history of the race. Notwithstanding that he knew his master was away from home fighting a battle which, if successful, would result in his continued enslavement, yet he worked faithfully for the support of his master’s family. If the Negro had yielded to the temptation and suggestion to use the torch or dagger in an attempt to destroy his master’s property or family, the result would have been that the war would have been quickly ended; for the master would have returned from the battlefield to protect and defend his property and family. But the Negro, to the last, was faithful to the trust that had been thrust upon him, and during the four years of war, there is not a single instance recorded where he attempted in any way to outrage the family or to injure his master’s property.”

His white friends have said as much. Thomas Nelson Page writes: “It is to the eternal credit of the Whites and of the Negroes that, during the four years of war, when the white men of the South were absent in the field, they could entrust their wives, their children, all they possessed, to the care and guardianship of their slaves with absolute confidence in their fidelity.” And again: “They raised the crop that fed the Confederate Army, and suffered without complaint the privations which came alike to White and Black.”

Those who experienced it all solemnly and sacredly acknowledge the debt of gratitude to that generation of negro servants which they as sacredly bequeathed to their posterity. Said a father to his son, thirty-four years after emancipation, as death was closing his eyes, “Son, see that my old black people are cared for.” This was his sole dying injunction.

But what is the significance of the testing of War? It meant that Africans who, in their native land, had acknowledged no obligation to anybody outside of tribal ties, whose habit of life had been constant warfare with all else, had been transformed by new family ties which embraced, in loyal fidelity, White and Black alike. It meant that savage people, who had owned no sense of responsibility save that which protected personal life and furthered personal wishes, had been so wonderfully tutored as to expand that sense of responsibility into a loyalty of trust that is little short of miraculous. A war whose issue was the Negro’s freedom, could not break that bond of trust. So far, in the character of its product—both White and Negro—the old family and trade-school had been tested, and the examination had been passed. When the War closed, the old friendship was as strong as ever, and the mutual relation closer than ever. In most cases, their freedom was first announced to their former slaves by the old masters; and both together set about the establishment of the new relations with hearty good will and the united desire “to re-build our homes.”

Then came the Reconstruction Period, with its testing of a very different nature. Here again, let us hear what the Negro has to say, and learn from himself his response. Dr. Washington writes: “At the close of the War, both the southern white man and the Negro found themselves in the midst of poverty. The ex-master returned from the war to find his slave-property gone, his farms and other industries in a state of collapse, and the whole industrial and economic system, upon which he had depended for years, entirely disorganized.

As we review, calmly and dispassionately, the period of reconstruction, we must use a great deal of sympathy and generosity. The weak point, to my mind, in the reconstruction era was that no strong force was brought to bear in the direction of preparing the Negro to become an intelligent, reliable citizen and voter. The main effort seemed to have been in the direction of controlling his vote for the time being, regardless of future interests. I hardly believe that any race of people, with similar preparation and similar surroundings, would have acted more wisely than, or very differently from, the way the Negro acted during the period of reconstruction.... I do not believe that the Negro was so much at fault for entering so largely into politics, and for the mistakes that were made in too many cases, as were the unscrupulous white leaders who got the Negro’s confidence, and controlled his vote, to further their own ends, regardless, in many cases, of the permanent welfare of the Negro. I have always considered it unfortunate that the southern white man did not make more effort during the period of reconstruction to get the confidence and sympathy of the Negro, and thus have been able to keep him in close touch and sympathy in politics.... What the Negro wants, and what the country wants to do, is to take advantage of all the lessons that were taught during the days of reconstruction, and apply these lessons bravely and honestly in laying the foundation upon which the Negro can stand in the future, and make himself a useful, honorable and desirable citizen, whether he has his new residence in the North, the South, or the West.”

The description is true. The white friend would have written this one sentence differently—“I have always considered it unfortunate that the Southern white man did not make more effort—to get the confidence of the Negro....” The misfortune was, that the old southern friends were not permitted to retain the confidence of their old Negro friends who were estranged and filled with suspicion by the same “unscrupulous white leaders who got the Negro’s confidence—to further their own ends.” Time and time again, during this era, far-seeing Southerners, sometimes against the vigorous protest of their neighbors, offered small farms to their old servants at very low prices, which would provide homes of self-respect and stem the tide of temptation to wander and to idle about. Not a few accepted the advice of their old and best friends; but the new toy of ownership was too alluring. In nearly all cases the feeling of wealth in possession bred spendthrift habits and the early loss of the farms.

But our purpose is not to trace the story of reconstruction. This has been amply told by Southerners—Thomas Nelson Page and others; and by Northerners—Carl Schurz, Rhodes and others. Our purpose is to note the result of this testing-time upon the pupils trained in the old plantation trade-school.

Again the answer is given by Dr. Washington, whose testimony is substantially that of his race of that generation. “This business contact with the southern white man, and the industrial training received on the plantations, put the Negro, at the close of the war, into possession of all the common and skilled labor of the South. For nearly twenty years after the war, except in one or two cases, the value of the industrial training given by the Negroes’ former masters on the plantations and elsewhere was overlooked. Negro men and women were educated in literature, mathematics and the sciences, with no thought of what had taken place on these plantations for two and one half centuries. After twenty years, those who were trained as mechanics, etc., during slavery, began to disappear by death; and gradually we awoke to the fact that we had no one to take their places. We had scores of young men learned in Greek; but few in carpentry, or mechanical or architectural drawing. We had trained many in Latin; but almost none as engineers, bridge-builders, and machinists. Numbers were taken from the farm and educated, but were educated in everything else except agriculture. Hence they had no sympathy with farm life, and did not return to it.”

The real fact is, that, as a result of the reconstruction policies, quite fifteen years were well nigh lost in the development of the Negro. For what is the value of tuition in Greek and Latin and the finer arts, for a few of the brighter minds—so few as barely to touch the fringe of the great race—compared with the prevailing temporary loss of the advantages of generations of training in practical arts, the racial estrangement in their old homes, and the long years of protected idleness and sloth such as Carl Schurz describes?

During this Reconstruction Period, the religious life as well as the industrial life of the Negro was disturbed and oftentimes destroyed with a resultant loss in the development of good citizenship.

The condition of the Church in the South, where so vast a majority of the Negroes were destined to retain their homes, is beyond a healthy imagination now to picture. The armies of the long years of war had swept over them from Virginia to Texas. The Rev. Bowyer Stewart, in his Hale Memorial Sermon of 1913, gives a summary, the accuracy of which may be accepted. In Virginia, some 14 churches were destroyed, and 24 more or less damaged; in South Carolina, 13 churches destroyed, and 26 chapels for Negroes; in Tennessee, only 3 churches escaped injury; while in Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas and Louisiana, the conditions were somewhat worse than in North Carolina. The many churches and schools put to military use, meant the destruction of furniture and the abuse of buildings, which rendered the latter useless for the time. Episcopal residences and rectories, in some cases, suffered either total or partial destruction. The poverty was very great. A careful examination, reported to the South Carolina Convention, in 1868, showed that “along the entire seaboard, from North Carolina to Georgia, where our Church had flourished for more than a century, there are but four parishes which maintain religious services; not one, outside the city of Charleston, can be called a living, self-sustaining parish; their clergy live by fishing, farming and mechanic arts.” Other Dioceses, though in less measure, as a rule, experienced great loss and great poverty.

But there were great men at the helm—Bishops Johns, Atkinson, Davis (soon succeeded by Howe), Elliott, the two Wilmers, Quintard, Lay, and Gregg. The five years to 1871, showed recovery of white communicants in nearly every Diocese except South Carolina. All alike had lost many of their negro members, the greatest loss being in South Carolina which originally had most. South Carolina, however, is a fairly typical illustration of the comparative loss of negro members throughout the South. In 1861, the Diocesan Journal records 2979 white communicants and 2973 colored; that of 1872, 3102 white, 618 colored, most of these in Calvary Church and St. Mark’s, Charleston.

Why was this? The facts are the more astonishing when one reflects upon the universal practice of the Church, during so many generations, of close religious association; upon the success of Christian teaching so apparently universal upon the complete trust in one another exhibited during the test of war; and the resultant feeling of affectionate gratitude on the part of the white Churchmen.

Moreover, the latter were prepared to continue the Christian ministrations under the new order in the confident expectation that, however changed the economic and social relation, nothing could sever the bond of Christian fellowship in the Church. Bishop Davis, in 1866, was expressing a conviction universally shared when, looking out upon the vast confusion, he nevertheless declared, “I have not complete statistics; but am convinced, from observation and information, that, in all cases where the colored population shall be reinstated in their former localities, they will return to the communion of the Church.” Unfortunately, however, succeeding years bore testimony to progressive losses, until another Bishop voiced the thought which experience, in turn, had universally brought: “The defection from the Church is almost universal. In some parishes I have visited, which a few years ago numbered more than a hundred communicants, not one has come forward to kneel at the altar, and very few to enter the church. The voice of remonstrance from their once-honored pastors falls unheeded upon their ears; unscriptural revelation are substituted for the Word of God; the ancient forms of worship are declared to quench the ministrations of the Spirit; and the sober worship of the sanctuary is exchanged for the midnight orgies of a frantic superstition.” There are some very bright and cheering exceptions, but this quotation from Bishop Wilmer, of Louisiana, describes the rule.

Why was it? The question may not be answered in a short phrase, and probably may not be answered satisfactorily at all.

There was the fact that the Negro’s religious teachers had been his masters, beloved under the old régime, but whose guidance and control, even in church, was to be regarded with wary suspicion. He could not differentiate between the essential wrong of a system, and the blessing which the Church had brought to him in that system. For the present, the wrong was uppermost in his mind.

Then there was the reconstruction system, and the hope held, in confident expectation, of a change in condition which a changed social relation would miraculously effect. The negro masses could not foresee the slow, toilsome pathway up which every primitive race has plodded to changed conditions, and better.

Again, there was the natural conviction of the Negro that his freed allegiance was now due to his northern liberators; and this, beyond any bond of slave-time friendship with those who had held him in slavery. It was the newborn freedom, from restraint, entering like new wine into old vessels overstrained.

Finally, there was among the few negro leaders, (and, because few, therefore all the more powerful) the exultant and alluring ambition to play the man, and to attempt to demonstrate the full-grown majority of a race just dropping its swaddling clothes.

These were the conditions (inevitable to the change of social structure from slave to free) ready at hand when the reconstruction policies offered the chance to unscrupulous politicians from North and South. They offered a ready opportunity for inspiring the Negro with a subtle distrust of former masters now become neighbors. Racial hatred for the wrongs of slavery, now became magnified to the exclusion of any benefits whatever derived from the system. For the unscrupulous, the rewards increased with the widening of the chasm between race and race; they were secured at the price of the ruthless exploitation of the Negroes, and the breeding of a spirit of suspicion and distrust toward their old friends.

To the positive and infallible declarations to the Negroes that allegiance to the Church of their masters meant the continuation of slavery, the great racial instinct, as yet untutored to know better, responded with tremendous and deep fervor. Only the few could know better, and have the courage to follow their own convictions. And what else could have been possible in view of the actual conditions? Had wiser counsels prevailed, and had old racial and personal attachments and interdependencies, so carefully built up, been fostered as the best condition under which to work out the stupendous problems of the new time, no one can doubt that the story of American life would have been different, and few can doubt that it would have been better. As it was, the conditions which served the unworthy ends of the white demagogue, were sadly fruitful in heartrending results upon the religion of the Negro.

For many, there was the clinging memory of heathen superstitions—hardly asleep—certainly not dead. There was the “call of the wild”—powerful over all nature, however highly developed—and now heard by a people only just freed from the leash. What race in all history has ever faced such sudden, such powerful temptations as were freely cast before this people, backed up by military occupancy? The amazing thing is, that they stood before such temptations with as little resulting harm to themselves and to the Whites as may justly be charged against either.

It was not alone, or even chiefly, that this was made possible by precautions to prevent racial clashes. It was, before everything else, because of the two centuries of American life in which the Negroes had more and more progressed in all that goes to transform heathen savages into Christian men and women, and had earned the right of trust and affection without the clogging burden of vast responsibility impossible of fulfilment. Dr. Washington is right when he says, as already noted, “I do not believe that the Negro was so much at fault ... for the mistakes that were made in too many cases, as were the unscrupulous white leaders who got the Negroes’ confidence ... to further their own ends.”

Those years of association had produced their intimate, confidential friendships between the white master and the strong head-men on every plantation—friendships which nothing could destroy; and every community points back to level headed, wise, older Negroes who saw, though they could not fully measure, the seriousness brought by the new day. The quiet, almost secret conferences of these old friends about the new life, entered as leaven into the great unleavened, working, dismayed mass. The break became a chasm as reconstruction advanced. The race had not yet had time to become established.

We must note, too, that slavery, however serviceable in the discipline of a new people, did not conduce to self-reliance in any walk of life; it was not the favorable condition out of which to develop steadfastness in the religious life so essential to desirable citizenship. “The law is the schoolmaster to lead to Christ,” is not only the terse description of a long episode in the history of our religious forefathers, it is still more the expression of the law of religious growth. First, there is the period of the imposition of law, with its tuition of restraint from without, gradually developing into self-imposed control as the sense of the reasonable justice and righteousness of it develops. Then the habit of balanced self-restraint, as the motive of righteousness, becomes instinct with life through the growth of the Christ-life in us, when the pattern life is the only life dominant over conscience.

To have expected this process to be completed, and its fruits full-grown, in any considerable number of this newly, partially converted people, was certainly unreasonable. It is our complaint of our own race, that, after more than twelve centuries of inherited Christian faith, we are so far from this consummation. At the very best, slavery was the reign of law, but with no settled objective toward the full “liberty of the children of God”; and as long as St. Paul’s law of development was arrested in mid-operation, it had scant chance of complete fruition.

In an age of progressive education through the printed page, this accepted means of hastening tuition in religious knowledge and spiritual character, was withheld from the slave as inapplicable, even dangerous, to his condition. While it may be recalled that Christianity flourished before printing, it is enough to say that human progress is the product of its own age, and the condition of an age retards him who declines or is deprived of conformity to it, as readily as it stimulates him who conforms.

Such is our attempt to explain the very great defection of the Negro from the white Churches after the war. Doubtless it falls short of being a complete explanation, but it seems to be at least a natural one.

The year 1880 may properly be considered as marking the close of the period of the War and Reconstruction. With exceptions noted later, the period was one of consternation to the leaders of the Church, and deep regret over what seemed the failure of the long years of devoted ministry; for the negro race had shown retrogression in every way, religiously, morally, and industrially. Those twenty years of lost opportunity of which Dr. Washington wrote, were lost to all save the very few who were strong enough to yield themselves to the best influences, and steadfastly to build that best into themselves. To the Church leaders of the day, all seemed lost. But was all lost? The answer of faith is an emphatic NO!

The Episcopal Church lost uncounted numbers of members. Some of these doubtless were never shepherded to any earthly fold. Most of them, with no education to add power to a half-formed faith, became partial victims of the temptations of traditional heathen religions. But the newly born and developing faith was not lost, even though the Fathers’ anxiety and profound distress over the lapse of spiritual children to “indications of African barbarism” are pathetic excuse for their despair. It would have been as unnatural for the Whites to measure the full significance of this day of complete revolution in the life of the Negroes, as for the Negroes to escape the first consequences of it. Nor was it possible for such an era to end in a day. Other peoples have had revolutions, and with like results. The French Revolution, with nearly 1700 years of Christian training behind its victims, and its consequences still a factor of no small power in French life, is a pointed instance. Indeed eras, good or bad, do not really end; they carry forward and onward. The era of Reconstruction carried onward in American life; and, in like manner, the era of Slavery, with its mingled beneficence and cruelty, its Christian and industrial training intertwined with heathen traditions, its régime of earnest, zealous, loving ministry, its “line upon line and precept upon precept” of unwearying tuition—this, too, for better or worse, influenced the Negro of a later period. When, at length, the excesses inevitably connected with the new-found freedom had ceased, and when the years of loss had come to an end, then the old training, religious and industrial, and the need for its power in racial development came once more to the fore in the minds of these few truly great and conspicuous leaders whose lives spanned the great gulf of past and present. These were able to wrest much of advantage to their race out of the very mistakes in education which Dr. Washington laments.

We have reminded ourselves of the tremendous, the indescribably difficult, task of the very small band of negro leaders, in guiding their people to a saner life and to the ambition to fill life with the best that God’s gifts to them would enable. Of such, were Bishop Payne, of the African Methodist Church; John Jasper, the famous Richmond preacher; Alexander Crummell, of the Episcopal Church; Henry M. Turner, of the African Methodist Church; Isaiah Montgomery, of Mount Bayou, Mississippi; and, of the younger men, Booker T. Washington and his successor Robert R. Moton, Archdeacon Russell, Dr. Bragg, Dr. Tunnell, Dr. Dubois, Bishop Demby, Professor Battle, and many others of their generation. What a load they have had to carry as represented by ignorance, superstition, low moral tone, shiftlessness and unresponse in the vast majority of their brethren! What a task, to overcome the losses of that very era which produced their younger men! What a supreme faith, what unswerving confidence in their great mission, were demanded, and in large measure provided! We can but reflect that, whether or no the Whites recognize the wisdom of the methods and philosophies of one or all or any of the negro leaders, the greatest sin we can commit toward them is to withhold our sympathy from them in their toilsome, troublous, tragic, upward pathway along which, with sweat of blood, they must lead the millions of their brethren. The demand of their condition, ever since Reconstruction, has been, and is now, for that patient, helpful sympathy from which confidence is born, the confidence which invites mutual conference, the correction of error, the enlightenment of motive and objective, and so on to a common task to which White and Negro alike can devote their best efforts.

As Dr. Washington says, it was too late to cry over what might have been. The era produced at least one institution (possibly there may have been others) which a wise head conceived—Hampton Institute, Virginia. General Armstrong, with equally wise retrospect and foresight, builded upon the past for an enduring future—a future that would restore the best in the past, and make the best better. Hampton would have been a success even had it died after producing Booker T. Washington, founder of Tuskegee Institute; and James S. Russell, founder of St Paul’s School, Lawrenceville, Va.

There was something, too, that the Reconstruction Era could not destroy. It could fan racial prejudices, and set race against race in political antagonism; but it could not destroy the deep, ever abiding affections between the races, which the old life had nurtured. That remained as both the motive for redeeming the time, and the foundation for the rebuilded life so sadly shattered and dismembered. The era ended, white and black again took up the task of rebuilding.

Of the total negro population, in 1880, about 95 per cent were still in the South; and, in 1920, after forty years of development, and in spite of the enticement of the fabulous wages in manufacturing States created by the World War, this percentage is still nearly 75 per cent. The South is the Negro’s home, and the conditions of his greatest opportunity are there. This is the testimony of both black and white observers. Read Edgar Gardner Murphy’s Problems of the Present South (p. 184 et seq.); DuBois’s The Philadelphia Negro; and this passage from the address by the Principal of Tuskegee which, in short, expresses the witness of all alike: “Wherever the Negro has lost ground, industrially, in the South, it is not because there is prejudice against him, as a skilled laborer, on the part of the native southern white man.... There is almost no prejudice, against the Negro in the South in matters of business, so far as the native Whites are concerned.” This was published in 1899. Since then, Labor Unions have had a disconcerting relation to the matter—a relation still in solution. But certainly there was a free field for the Negro for about half a century, coupled with about as much help from the white people as they could give and as the Negro would seek; from the Northern White also, about as much as the Negro could profitably use. The results of these fifty years seem to prove this, and to offer irrefutable evidence of the excellent preparatory work of the old patriarchal system which we have reviewed in a previous chapter.