The American Negro; what he was, what he is, and what he may become; a critical and practical discussion

Front matter

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CHAPTER VI CHAPTER VII vii

CONTENTS viii

CHAPTER Vm

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CHAPTER IX

CHAPTER X

CHAPTER XI

CHAPTER XII

CHAPTER XIII

CHAPTER XIV

Index 433

The title of this work is sufficiently explicit, I take it, to leave no room for doubt as to its general character, though there is a disposition in some quarters to use other terms than negro to designate that class of our people derived from African origin. For ordinary purposes, the inhabitants of this country may be fairly divided into white and colored classes. Nevertheless, such racial grouping is neither an exact nor a true ethnological designation of the American people, for the reason that it does not agree with known facts. For example, many persons of negroid ancestry, but white in color, are classed with the white race in communities ignorant of their negro origin. On the other hand, many Italians, Portuguese, Mexicans, and Indians, are dark complexioned, but without the least strain of negro blood. Therefore, as there is such a thing as a distinctively negro people, and as it is in indisputable evidence that the American freed people were primarily derived from a genuine negro stock, there is ample warrant for using the terms negro and negroid in designating the person, as well as the forms of thought and action, characteristic of the descendants of such ancestors.

The normal color of the negro is black, but that

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X color is neither his exclusive property nor his only hue. As a matter of fact, variant shades of color are found in his racial existence. Hence, neither the phrase, negro people,” nor its kindred appellatives, as employed in these pages, are to be understood as invariably implying a black segment of mankind, but rather as a uniform designation of a pronounced set of characteristics, specifically exemplified in the physical, mental, and moral qualities of a type of humanity. Color, then, apart from defined negroid characteristics, in nowise enters into the questions under consideration, though the characteristics themselves are manifest in white, black, yellow, brown, and other variable tints of racial color.

My contentions on this point are that any man, of whatever hue, who exhibits the characteristic traits which I shall hereafter describe is a negro ; otherwise, he is not. For example, I have some relatives who are fair in color, but negroes in every sense of the word, and other relatives, who, though dark in complexion, are in other respects comparatively free from negro idiosyncrasies. I have also personal knowledge of many individuals, representing all shades of color, wlio are manfully engaged in a struggle to free themselves from all visible trace of racial traits. Having submitted these observations, I hope to have made it clear that this contribution to American sociology deals in a fundamental sense with specific traits of character, and with color only in so far as it is incidental to ethnological characteristics.

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I began this undertaking with a profound belief in the truth, ^^What man has thought, man can think ; what man has felt, man can feel ; what man has done, man can do ; ” nor have my labors lessened my faith in that direction. Therefore, in the trust that all negroid men and women, now hedged about with discouragements and hampered by privations, but, nevertheless, hungering and thirsting after the realities of true manhood and womanhood, may be encouraged to strive for the consummation of their ideals, I take them at once into my confidence, and give them a bit of my personal history. To such my narrative may bring cheer and success, when they come to know how one of their kith and kin, who was reared like themselves in the school of adversity, and in addition physically disabled at the dawn of manhood, throughout a lifelong struggle with adverse circumstances, in which he owed nothing to adventitious influences, not only acquired by discriminate reading and serious meditation on the great issues of life a fair degree of knowledge of men and things, but also found that every endowment of manhood or womanhood is within the reach of every human being who puts integrity before material gain and self-respect before mendacious folly.

None of my ancestors was owned in slavery, so far as my knowledge goes. On my mother’s side I come from German and English stock. My maternal grandfather, the son of a white indentured

Xll female servant by a colored man^ was born at Bedford^ Pennsylvania, about the year 1758. My maternal grandmother was a white German woman, born in 1770, and brought up at Hagerstown, Maryland. This branch of my ancestry emigrated to Ohio in 1792, and settled near the town of Marietta, where my mother was born, in 1812. On the paternal side, both of my grandparents, who were of mixed blood, were Virginians by birth. My father, who was born in the year 1808, near Moorfield, in Hardy County, removed to Ohio before attaining his majority. I was born on a farm, in a log cabin, on the fourth day of May, 1843, in Jackson Township, Pickaway County, Ohio. My earliest memories recall my father and mother with their circle of children gathered round the family fireside Sabbath afternoons engaged in reading the Scriptures, and recitations of the Decalogue and the Shorter Catechism. These wholesome teachings, including the morning orisons and evening prayers, with the never omitted supplication for those who were in bonds,” produced indelible impressions on my youthful mind, and exerted an abiding influence over my life.

This reference to the daily prayers for an enslaved class indicates that I was bred in an atmosphere of aversion to human bondage. Action, however, not speech merely, opened my understanding, and gave me positive convictions concerning life and liberty. For, as far back as I can remember, my parents’ home was the rendezvous of escaping slaves, from

Xlll whose recital my childish heart drank in the miseries of human chattel. My father was an active conductor on the Underground Kailroad, ’’ and, besides sheltering and succoring slavery’s unfortunate victims, spent many of his nights in transporting his passengers nearer to their haven of refuge. Nor was he alone in this respect ; there were many others in that state, which was a chief gateway between slavery and freedom, to whom no panegyrics have been sung, and whose names are not emblazoned in historic annals, but who, nevertheless, put in jeopardy their lives and liberty, to protect and defend the fleeing subjects of an atrocious enthralment and bear them well on the way to a land of freedom.

I came into this world a child of poverty, and my early days were spent in struggle for the maintenance of myself and others. Moreover, having no exceptional mental or physical traits, and inheriting the weakness as well as the strength which comes from even legitimate race admixture, I suffered the additional disadvantage of having been brought up in the seclusion of country life, and kept in ignorance of many things accounted wise. Therefore, when in my early youth, with scant human wisdom, I was suddenly thrust into contact with public activities, I had no guide but a slowly growing experience ; which experience I found to be an inexorable teacher, one that never condoned a fault nor erased a blunder.

What I shall now say may appear incredible to this age of schools and students, for the enjoy-

XIV ment of whose advantag-es I would have bartered half

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of my life ; and in this I am not alone, for there are still to be found a multitude of elderly men and women who, having passed through similar privation, like myself yearn to have possessed the wasted educational opportunities of the modern youth. In my day the country district school was a three months’ affair, and at best afforded only the most rudimentary instruction. Moreover, it was not until my thirteenth year that I saw the inside of a schoolroom, when I spent eleven weeks in the first and only colored school I ever attended. My mother had early taught me reading, for which I soon developed an extraordinary fondness. Therefore, having read some books of history and travel, though I was chiefly familiar with the Bible, I found myself, when I entered upon my first school experience, ahead in intelligence of many who were twice my age. Two years passed before I was privileged to receive further instruction, when the opportunity came to me to enter a country district school, in which I remained twelve weeks ; that was during the years 1857-1858. The following winter I spent twelve weeks in an ungraded village school, the best of its kind in the vicinity, where I was admitted to the highest classes. In the spring of 1859 I hired myself to a small farmer, who engaged to pay for my services, and for whom I worked five months at eleven dollars a month. With these earnings, I was enabled, during the winter of 1859-1860, to spend ten weeks in study

XV in the preparatory department of Otterbein University, in Westerville, Ohio. Thus ended my preparatory school training, which gave me a fair knowledge of arithmetic, grammar, geography, and history.

During the memorable events of 1860 I was busy with farm labor, and also undertook to learn a mechanical trade, in which I was engaged when the war broke out in the spring of 1861. 1 immediately

tendered my services to the government, but was refused on account of my color, — one of not a few instances where color has militated against me. After being refused admission to the army, I spent the summer of 1861 in teaching, supplying the place of the principal of the Union Seminary, which at that time was the sole academic school in America managed by negroes. In September of the same year I entered the 42d Ohio Infantry Eegiment, in a civil capacity. The following winter I was in the Big Sandy campaign, with General Garfield, and during the summer of 1862 with the Union forces at Cumberland Gap, Tennessee. In the fall of that year our troops returned to Ohio, when I joined the 95th Kegiment (then recruiting in Camp Chase), which was assigned to the Department of the Mississippi and which took a leading part in the Vicksburg campaign. I remained with this regiment until after the capture of Vicksburg, when I returned to Ohio and enlisted in the 5th United States colored troops, then in course of formation at Delaware, Ohio, and was appointed sergeant in Company I,

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This colored regiment, commanded by Colonel Giles W. Shurtleff, who had previously been a professor in Oberlin College, was assigned to the Department of the James, where, during the summer of 1864, it bore a conspicuous part in the campaign before Petersburg and Kichmond, and later on was sent to Fort Fisher. In its second expedition, under General Terry, resulted, as is well known, the capture of Fort Fisher. After that event we were sent up the Cape Fear River to destroy the intervening fortifications, and to occupy Wilmington, North Carolina. On the evening of the 21st of February, 1865, in an attack on the outer defences of that city, I received a gunshot wound in my right arm, which resulted in its amputation above the elbow, and my transfer North, where I spent five months in a hospital at Baltimore, Maryland.

On my discharge from the army I was induced to enter a Presbyterian seminary, where, though seriously handicapped by a lack of preparatory training, I studied theology, with fair acquittance, from 1865 to 1868. After leaving the seminary, I engaged for a while in religious newspaper work, and to my contact with the editor, the Rev. Daniel Shindler, a man of scholarship and of great moral worth, I attribute the awakening of my best impulses and highest aspirations. In 1871 I went South to organize schools and teach the freedmen, and in 1873 took up my residence in Newberry County, South Carolina, where, in January of the following year, after a rigid

FORE WORD xvii examination, and in the face of strong opposition from the Southern white lawyers, I was licensed to practise law in the courts of that state. About the same time I was appointed a trial justice for the county in which I lived. It is due to myself to say that my knowledge of jurisprudence was acquired entirely from self -teaching. I had neither attended a law

school nor received private instruction ; yet I am led to believe that my success at the bar was not altogether discreditable.

In the autumn of 1876 I was elected a member of the legislature of South Carolina, and when that body convened I was made chairman of its leading committees. It may be added, as an historical fact, that during the stormy period that ensued, my services contributed in no slight measure to the settlement of the presidential issue of that year. About the same time that I was elected a state representative I was admitted to practise before the state Supreme Court, and also commissioned a colonel of the National Guard.

I have never regarded the political rights of the freedman as essential to his well-being, though I have no sympathy with the forcible methods which are employed to prevent his exercising them. Vfhen, therefore, the critical stage in reconstruction was reached, my conviction was confirmed by the ease with which the existing Eepublican governments of the South were overthrown, and it was then that I gave up the practice of law, and withdrew from

XVlll active participation in politics, in order that I might devote my chief attention to the educational and social advancement of the freedmen. In pursuance of that purpose I built churches, established schoolhouses, and created facilities for primary instruction in localities where such were before unknown. Nor did I cease endeavors better to observe and study the negro in every phase of his existence until I had visited every Southern state and community. In my varied experience in the South I have slept in bare cabins, sat on earthen floors, and eaten corn pone, and witnessed as much genuine self-respect in log huts as I have ever beheld in the most pretentious negro homes. I have kept step with the illiterate freedman as he pursued his daily round of toil in the field or forest, and sat in rapt attention at his hearthstone at night while he recounted his own privations or drew vivid pictures of what he dreamed, but dared not hope, his children might become. I have also witnessed the ostentatious flauntings of negro pretensions in church, in the schoolroom, in social intercourse, and in material undertakings ; and in not a few instances have been moved to righteous indignation at the insensate follies of a race blind to every passing opportunity. I have freely rendered unstinted service to the negro people without acquiring preferment or receiving reward ; and, despite personal indignities and material losses, I hav^e a consciousness that neither the malevolence of enemies nor the ingratitude of friends could move me to take a backxix ward step in the cause of humanity, or falter in iny efforts for its amelioration.

I have now a word to say to a larger audience, — the American people, — because, in my judgment, the negro question embodies the most momentous problems that have engaged the attention of the nation. I think I have fairly diagnosed the racial situation, and have pointed out rational and efficient remedies for the elimination of race disabilities, by putting within the reach of those who desire to free them selves from the thraldom of inherited degradation means for regeneration. While nothing which I have written concerning the habits of the freedmen is new to the negroes themselves, who in their secluded gatherings show no reluctance to talk freely of themselves, yet so far as the white race is concerned there is very little first-hand knowledge regarding these topics. In fact, I doubt if any white person lives who has an adequate comprehension of negro characteristics, notwithstanding the many who descant glibly on the present and future of the freed people.

I know that few have any actual knowledge of their hidden lives and real living in their homes, churches, and social intercourse ; especially of their individual hopes and fears, of opportunities denied them, of temptations besetting them, of prejudices they encounter, of victories they achieve. It is therefore obvious that the American white people have no intelligent insight into negro sociology ; and it is

XX reasonable, to assume that, apart from the annual educational mendicant and the clerical beggar, the essential facts of negro life are as little known to the great mass of our people as they were three centuries ago. Furthermore, I make bold to say that no genuine attempt has been made, in any quarter, to know the negro as a freeman and as a citizen of our republican commonwealth. He has rights which are denied, as well as wrongs that have gone unredressed ; and though he possesses many despicable traits that environment has accentuated, nevertheless his acknowledged exemplars have not all been saints, nor are his teachers altogether blameless for existing racial conditions.

Of course an intelligent public has a right to challenge all newcomers, and demand a show of credentials. I recognize the force and validity of the demand, and I ask but a fair hearing for what I have submitted, and an honest consideration for what I disclose. In preparing this work, I have not sought to vindicate any preconceived notions or prejudices of my own regarding its subject-matter, nor in arriving at my conclusions have I trusted to imperfect recollections or superficial observations. The sources from which my material has been drawn are carefully written notes, representing studies of the negro question in all its known phases, and reaching over a period of more than thirty years. I have had an extended experience in teaching the negro, one that brought me in contact with all grades of students and xxi covered every variety of instruction, and in whicli I learned that in memorizing and imitating the f reedman is unique, but that otherwise his intellectual powers are unawakened. In addition, a judicial experience of more than three years of daily official contact with every phase of civil and criminal litigation gave me an insight into negro peculiarities, such as could have been obtained in no other way, and I early discovered the absolute untrustworthiness of self-interested negro statement.

I have been a student of political history and participant in civic functions for more than three decades, having cast my first vote, for Abraham Lincoln, in 1864. During that time I have beheld the transition of the negro from chattelism to freedom, to enfranchisement, to legislative power, to dominating insolence, to riotous infamy ; and through it all I have beheld his accredited leealers impervious to every thought or care for race, government, civilization, or posterity. From my youth I have had an intimate knowledge of negro religionists, and have learned to know by personal experience the shallowness of their pretensions, the depravity of their morals, the ignorance of their ministers, the bigotry of their leaders, and the levity of their faith. The social side of negro life has been to me an open page of execrable weakness, of unblushing shame, of inconceivable mendacity, of indurated folly and ephemeral contrition. In my analysis and comparison of facts, whether of negro depravity or negro xxii aspiration, I have seen everywhere the same fixed traces of an environing heredity cropping out through selfishness, insincerity, and servility as the bar sinister of negrology. I have found the unlearned bigoted ; the learned of the race, pompous ; and all, of every sort, pitifully indifferent to the welfare and uplifting of men and women sitting in darkness and in the shadow of death.

I am firmly rooted in the conviction that negroism, as exemplified in the American type, is an attitude of mental density, a kind of spiritual sensuousness ; but that each of these characteristics, though endowed with great persistency and potency, is nevertheless amenable to radical treatment. On account of this belief I have pity and profound sympathy for an awakening group of negroes, to whom, in their blind gropings in the dark after a clew and thread to Grodhood and manhood, I gladly reach out a hand of succor. On the other hand, I have a deep-seated aversion to and unfeigned disgust for a distinctive phase of negro stolidity characteristic of those bereft of all uplifting desire, because I know that they deliberately and of set purpose pander to every phase of racial viciousness and resist every attempt for social betterment. While all things are possible to those who work and wait with patient intelligence, still, I am fully satisfied that neither mental regeneration nor moral transformation will ever come to the freed people until, shorn of illusions, their depravity, ignorance, and bitter mockeries of all that is real and

XXlll earnest in life are laid bare to their vision and brought home to their consciousness.

Two things, however, ought to be understood. One is, that the admitted degradation of the race is not characteristic of all persons of negroid ancestry ; the other, that the common, indiscriminate inclusion of all persons of color in the same category is an unjust classification, which acts with great severity against a saving remnant of good men and true women. It is, therefore, a grave mistake on the part of the general public to assume that all freedmen are alike in character and conduct. The great majority, it is true, have all the defects and weaknesses attributed to them ; but it is also a fact that good and true men and women are to be found among them. There are women of virtuous lives and consecrated living; mothers of integrity and daughters of chastity. There are also veracious men of tried integrity, whose lives are of honest worth, and whose moral stability is often obscured by the audacious intrusion of brazen cant.

These discussions cover a wide range of thought. I have refrained, however, from indulging in any elaborate analysis of the several phases which this question assumes, since that would be foreign to the fundamental purpose, that is, to build a feasible structure over the chasm which divides the negro as he is from that which he may become. ' In giving publicity to these facts, I am actuated neither by prejudice, sentiment, cravenness, nor egotism, but

XXIV moved simply and solely by an irdense desire to awaken the negro people out of their sleep of death. I have sought to show the depth of negro degradation, the height of negro achievement, in the hope that, stripped of all glosses and shams, the race would be moved to gird itself anew with the garb of truth and righteousness. If what I have stated to be realities are untrue, they should be re-stated ; if my declarations are misleading, they should be corrected. No mere denial will impeach the validity of what is here set forth, for facts must be met with facts.

I shall expect, and gladly welcome, intelligent and honest criticism. Of the other sort, there will doubtless come a chorus of vapid whimperings, from those who know that race awakening means renunciation of shams and the overthrow of knavish guidance. But of what inspiration have the clerical or political negro leaders of America ever been to their racial brethren ? What sane suggestions have they made, or unselfish service rendered, which would commend them to the merited approbation of mankind ? I also anticipate denunciation at the hands of the white quacks and tricksters in politics, churches, and schools, who are now profiting by negro credulity, and to whom an exalting of racial ideals means dethronement, and a loss of pecuniary gain. On the other hand, this analysis of the freedman’s characteristics, with its accompanying suggestions, should prove of helpful and timely assistance to the honest and self-effacing teacher or preacher of either race.

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It is possible that there may be freedmen who will read this book in a mood of resentment toward the writer and with anger at its disclosures. Should there be any so unwise, they are kindly advised to re-peruse it in a spirit of calmness, and with a purpose to know the truth and all of the truth as it relates to themselves and others of their race. Furthermore, should there be any who have a disposition to controvert these conclusions, or deny that my criticisms of the freedman are warranted by existing facts, such persons should understand that it rests with them to make good whatever pretensions to the contrary they may set up. They must demonstrate beyond a reasonable doubt that the negro is a superior being to that which I have made him out to be, and one already endowed with actual and useful ability. Moreover, so long as the general average of race capacity is of an admittedly low order, the required proofs will not be furnished by bringing forward exceptional cases of individual development. On the other hand, if the facts are with me, it obviously becomes the highest duty of every man, imbued with the spirit of truth, to preach the gospel of immediate and unconditional race redemption. In no other way can wisdom and strength be acquired by the negro people. This fundamental obligation exists, nor can it be lightly evaded, even should it come to pass that the mass of the freedmen refuse to have a more abundant life, and, with deliberate intent, stone xxvi their prophets and crucify their redeemers/’ Finally, as the crux of this whole issue is clearly to ascertain whether negro regeneration is possible or impossible, it should be realized that it rests chiefly with the freedman himself to determine what he may become, and, therefore, what the character of his race conditions is to be in social and civic relations.

Chapter I Alien Ciiattelism

African slavery is tlie oldest of all known systems of chattelisnij and^ as the earliest records show, was universal in the dark continent. From the dawn of commerce and civilization slaves were its chief commodity of exchange with foreign peoples. India, Persia, Babylon, Arabia, Phoenicia, the Hebrews, Greece, and Borne trafficked in negro slaves, exchanging their spices, wine, silks, jewels, linen, and tapestry for sable bondmen. But in the last four centuries the Arabs and the Portuguese have been the foreign slave factors of Africa, the former supplying the Eastern, and the latter the Western, slave markets of the world, which, until slavery was abolished in our hemisphere, consisted of North, South, and Central America, as well as the West Indian Islands. Negro slaves had been brought into Spain as early as 1480 A.D., and that government deported a large number of them to the Island of Hayti, near the close of the fifteenth century. To Spain, therefore, belongs the execrable dishonor of having introduced human chat-

B telism into the New World, though Sir John Hawkins, the first Englishman to engage in negro slave trading, took a number of slave cargoes to the West Indian Islands during the early part of the latter half of the sixteenth century, at great financial profit to himself and his royal partner, the Virgin Queen.

The discoveries in North America by Cabot in 1497 led, a little more than a century later, to the permanent establishment of two English colonies on these shores. Both of these colonial ventures were small in numbers and ill-equipped for co|)ing with the hardships of a hostile environment. Nevertheless, they have exerted a profound influence upon the development and destiny of the American people, as well as of the whole English-speaking world. It was the success of the American colonial plantings which led to English enterprises in Australia and South Africa.

The Jamestown and Plymouth colonies proved of the greatest import to the American nation. Each of these movements contained the germs of an undeveloped civilization ; through them two mighty forces, distinct in character and antagonistic in purpose, germinated at the same period in the Western World. The basis on which the Plymouth ideal grounded its convictions was individual industry and civic freedom ; while the foundation of the J amestown polity was an idle gentry served by inferior dependants. The Jamestown colony consisted of less than seventy-five persons, forty-eight of whom were gentlemen,”

who, idle, dissolute, and mercenary, had come to America to mend their fortunes, some of them to escape punishment for crime. The rest of the colony, including a few mechanics, were laborers brought out to serve these impoverished scions of nobility. On the other hand, the Plymouth colony, consisting of one hundred persons, was composed of earnest, God-fearing men and women who had braved the deep, and buried themselves in a bleak and barren wilderness for conscience’ sake, girt from the beginning with indomitable courage and indefatigable industry, and to whom idleness was a crime and immorality an unpardonable sin. The Puritan came to these shores to establish a home, to rear a family, to perpetuate a God-given faith. The Cavalier brought no family; the New World was to him a place where he might gather wealth to enrich an English home. By keeping these distinctions in mind we may form a very clear conception of the inchoate conditions of colonial civilization at a time when a formidable factor made its appearance, one which for more than two centuries afterward swayed the destinies of the American people.

The English settlement at Jamestown, Virginia, was founded May 13, 1607, by the London Trading Company. Twelve years later the first cargo of negro slaves purchased by English colonists was landed there, in the month of August, 1619. It is a popular but erroneous notion that the first negro slaves employed in this country were those brought to