A Social History of the American Negro Part 14

Within recent years it has recognized the importance of industrial work and has had in all departments an average annual enrollment of 300. Not quite so prominent within the last few years, but with more tradition and theoretically at the head of the educational system of the Republic is the Liberia College. In 1848 Simon Greenleaf of Boston, received from John Payne, a missionary at Cape Palmas, a request for his a.s.sistance in building a theological school. Out of this suggestion grew the Board of Trustees of Donations for Education in Liberia incorporated in Ma.s.sachusetts in March, 1850. The next year the Liberia legislature incorporated the Liberia College, it being understood that the inst.i.tution would emphasize academic as well as theological subjects. In 1857 Ex-President J.J. Roberts was elected president; he superintended the erection of a large building; and in 1862 the college was opened for work. Since then it has had a very uneven existence, sometimes enrolling, aside from its preparatory department, twenty or thirty college students, then again having no college students at all. Within the last few years, as the old building was completely out of repair, the school has had to seek temporary quarters. It is too vital to the country to be allowed to languish, however, and it is to be hoped that it may soon be well started upon a new career of usefulness. In the course of its history the Liberia College has had connected with it some very distinguished men. Famous as teacher and lecturer, and president from 1881 to 1885, was Edward Wilmot Blyden, generally regarded as the foremost scholar that Western Africa has given to the world. Closely a.s.sociated with him in the early years, and well known in America as in Africa, was Alexander Crummell, who brought to his teaching the richness of English university training. A trustee for a number of years was Samuel David Ferguson, of the Protestant Episcopal Church, who served with great dignity and resource as missionary bishop of the country from 1884 until his death in 1916. A new president of the college, Rev.

Nathaniel H.B. Ca.s.sell, was elected in 1918, and it is expected that under his efficient direction the school will go forward to still greater years of service.

Important in connection with the study of the social conditions in Liberia is that of health and living conditions. One who lives in America and knows that Africa is a land of unbounded riches can hardly understand the extent to which the West Coast has been exploited, or the suffering that is there just now. The distress is most acute in the English colonies, and as Liberia is so close to Sierra Leone and the Gold Coast, much of the same situation prevails there. In Monrovia the only bank is the branch of the Bank of British West Africa. In the branches of this great inst.i.tution all along the coast, as a result of the war, gold disappeared, silver became very scarce, and the common form of currency became paper notes, issued in denominations as low as one and two s.h.i.+llings. These the natives have refused to accept. They go even further: rather than bring their produce to the towns and receive paper for it they will not come at all. In Monrovia an effort was made to introduce the British West African paper currency, and while this failed, more and more the merchants insisted on being paid in silver, nor in an ordinary purchase would silver be given in change on an English ten-s.h.i.+lling note. Prices accordingly became exorbitant; children were not properly nourished and the infant mortality grew to astonis.h.i.+ng proportions. Nor were conditions made better by the lack of sanitation and by the prevalence of disease. Happily relief for these conditions--for some of them at least--seems to be in sight, and it is expected that before very long a hospital will be erected in Monrovia.

One or two reflections suggest themselves. It has been said that the circ.u.mstances under which Liberia was founded led to a despising of industrial effort. The country is now quite awake, however, to the advantages of industrial and agricultural enterprise. A matter of supreme importance is that of the relation of the Americo-Liberian to the native; this will work itself out, for the native is the country's chief a.s.set for the future. In general the Republic needs a few visible evidences of twentieth century standards of progress; two or three high schools and hospitals built on the American plan would work wonders.

Finally let it not be forgotten that upon the American Negro rests the obligation to do whatever he can to help to develop the country. If he will but firmly clasp hands with his brother across the sea, a new day will dawn for American Negro and Liberian alike.

CHAPTER X

THE NEGRO A NATIONAL ISSUE

1. _Current Tendencies_

It is evident from what has been said already that the idea of the Negro current about 1830 in the United States was not very exalted. It was seriously questioned if he was really a human being, and doctors of divinity learnedly expounded the "Cursed be Canaan" pa.s.sage as applying to him. A prominent physician of Mobile[1] gave it as his opinion that "the brain of the Negro, when compared with the Caucasian, is smaller by a tenth ... and the intellect is wanting in the same proportion," and finally a.s.serted that Negroes could not live in the North because "a cold climate so freezes their brains as to make them insane." About mulattoes, like many others, he stretched his imagination marvelously.

They were incapable of undergoing fatigue; the women were very delicate and subject to all sorts of diseases, and they did not beget children as readily as either black women or white women. In fact, said Nott, between the ages of twenty-five and forty mulattoes died ten times as fast as either white or black people; between forty and fifty-five fifty times as fast, and between fifty-five and seventy one hundred times as fast.

[Footnote 1: See "Two Lectures on the Natural History of the Caucasian and Negro Races. By Josiah C. Nott, M.D., Mobile, 1844."]

To such opinions was now added one of the greatest misfortunes that have befallen the Negro race in its entire history in America--burlesque on the stage. When in 1696 Thomas Southerne adapted _Oroonoko_ from the novel of Mrs. Aphra Behn and presented in London the story of the African prince who was stolen from his native Angola, no one saw any reason why the Negro should not be a subject for serious treatment on the stage, and the play was a great success, lasting for decades. In 1768, however, was presented at Drury Lane a comic opera, _The Padlock_, and a very prominent character was Mungo, the slave of a West Indian planter, who got drunk in the second act and was profane throughout the performance. In the course of the evening Mungo entertained the audience with such lines as the following:

Dear heart, what a terrible life I am led!

A dog has a better, that's sheltered and fed.

Night and day 'tis the same; My pain is deir game: Me wish to de Lord me was dead!

Whate'er's to be done, Poor black must run.

Mungo here, Mungo dere, Mungo everywhere: Above and below, Sirrah, come; sirrah, go; Do so, and do so, Oh! oh!

Me wish to de Lord me was dead!

The depreciation of the race that Mungo started continued, and when in 1781 _Robinson Crusoe_ was given as a pantomime at Drury Lane, Friday was represented as a Negro. The exact origins of Negro minstrelsy are not altogether clear; there have been many claimants, and it is interesting to note in pa.s.sing that there was an "African Company"

playing in New York in the early twenties, though this was probably nothing more than a small group of amateurs. Whatever may have been the beginning, it was Thomas D. Rice who brought the form to genuine popularity. In Louisville in the summer of 1828, looking from one of the back windows of a theater, he was attracted by an old and decrepit slave who did odd jobs about a livery stable. The slave's master was named Crow and he called himself Jim Crow. His right shoulder was drawn up high and his left leg was stiff at the knee, but he took his deformity lightly, singing as he worked. He had one favorite tune to which he had fitted words of his own, and at the end of each verse he made a ludicrous step which in time came to be known as "rocking the heel." His refrain consisted of the words:

Wheel about, turn about, Do jis so, An' ebery time I wheel about I jump Jim Crow.

Rice, who was a clever and versatile performer, caught the air, made up like the Negro, and in the course of the next season introduced Jim Crow and his step to the stage, and so successful was he in his performance that on his first night in the part he was encored twenty times.[1] Rice had many imitators among the white comedians of the country, some of whom indeed claimed priority in opening up the new field, and along with their burlesque these men actually touched upon the possibilities of plaintive Negro melodies, which they of course capitalized. In New York late in 1842 four men--"Dan" Emmett, Frank Brower, "Billy" Whitlock, and "d.i.c.k" Pelham--practiced together with fiddle and banjo, "bones"

and tambourine, and thus was born the first company, the "Virginia Minstrels," which made its formal debut in New York February 17, 1843.

Its members produced in connection with their work all sorts of popular songs, one of Emmett's being "Dixie," which, introduced by Mrs. John Wood in a burlesque in New Orleans at the outbreak of the Civil War, leaped into popularity and became the war-song of the Confederacy.

Companies multipled apace. "Christy's Minstrels" claimed priority to the company already mentioned, but did not actually enter upon its New York career until 1846. "Bryant's Minstrels" and Buckley's "New Orleans Serenaders" were only two others of the most popular aggregations featuring and burlesquing the Negro. In a social history of the Negro in America, however, it is important to observe in pa.s.sing that already, even in burlesque, the Negro element was beginning to enthrall the popular mind. About the same time as minstrelsy also developed the habit of belittling the race by making the name of some prominent and worthy Negro a term of contempt; thus "cuffy" (corrupted from Paul Cuffe) now came into widespread use.

[Footnote 1: See Laurence Hutton: "The Negro on the Stage," in _Harper's Magazine_, 79:137 (June, 1889), referring to article by Edmon S. Conner in _New York Times_, June 5, 1881.]

This was not all. It was now that the sinister crime of lynching raised its head in defiance of all law. At first used as a form of punishment for outlaws and gamblers, it soon came to be applied especially to Negroes. One was burned alive near Greenville, S.C., in 1825; in May, 1835, two were burned near Mobile for the murder of two children; and for the years between 1823 and 1860 not less than fifty-six cases of the lynching of Negroes have been ascertained, though no one will ever know how many lost their lives without leaving any record. Certainly more men were executed illegally than legally; thus of forty-six recorded murders by Negroes of owners or overseers between 1850 and 1860 twenty resulted in legal execution and twenty-six in lynching. Violent crimes against white women were not relatively any more numerous than now; but those that occurred or were attempted received swift punishment; thus of seventeen cases of rape in the ten years last mentioned Negroes were legally executed in five and lynched in twelve.[1]

[Footnote 1: See Hart: _Slavery and Abolition_, 11 and 117, citing Cutler: _Lynch Law_, 98-100 and 126-128.]

Extraordinary attention was attracted by the burning in St. Louis in 1835 of a man named McIntosh, who had killed an officer who was trying to arrest him.[1] This event came in the midst of a period of great agitation, and it was for denouncing this lynching that Elijah P.

Lovejoy had his printing-office destroyed in St. Louis and was forced to remove to Alton, Ill., where his press was three times destroyed and where he finally met death at the hands of a mob while trying to protect his property November 7, 1837. Judge Lawless defended the lynching and even William Ellery Channing took a compromising view. Abraham Lincoln, however, then a very young man, in an address on "The Perpetuation of Our Political Inst.i.tutions" at Springfield, January 27, 1837, said: "Accounts of outrages committed by mobs form the everyday news of the times. They have pervaded the country from New England to Louisiana; they are neither peculiar to the eternal snows of the former nor the burning suns of the latter; they are not the creatures of climate, neither are they confined to the slaveholding or the nonslaveholding states.... Turn to that horror-striking scene at St. Louis. A single victim only was sacrificed there. This story is very short, and is perhaps the most highly tragic of anything that has ever been witnessed in real life. A mulatto man by the name of McIntosh was seized in the street, dragged to the suburbs of the city, chained to a tree, and actually burned to death; and all within a single hour from the time he had been a free man attending to his own business and at peace with the world.... Such are the effects of mob law, and such are the scenes becoming more and more frequent in this land so lately famed for love of law and order, and the stories of which have even now grown too familiar to attract anything more than an idle remark."

[Footnote 1: Cutler: _Lynch Law_, 109, citing Niles's _Register_, June 4, 1836.]

All the while flagrant crimes were committed against Negro women and girls, and free men in the border states were constantly being dragged into slavery by kidnapers. Two typical cases will serve for ill.u.s.tration. George Jones, a respectable man of New York, was in 1836 arrested on Broadway on the pretext that he had committed a.s.sault and battery. He refused to go with his captors, for he knew that he had done nothing to warrant such a charge; but he finally yielded on the a.s.surance of his employer that everything possible would be done for him. He was placed in the Bridewell and a few minutes afterwards taken before a magistrate, to whose satisfaction he was proved to be a slave.

Thus, in less than two hours after his arrest he was hurried away by the kidnapers, whose word had been accepted as sufficient evidence, and he had not been permitted to secure a single friendly witness. Solomon Northrup, who afterwards wrote an account of his experiences, was a free man who lived in Saratoga and made his living by working about the hotels, where in the evenings he often played the violin at parties. One day two men, supposedly managers of a traveling circus company, met him and offered him good pay if he would go with them as a violinist to Was.h.i.+ngton. He consented, and some mornings afterwards awoke to find himself in a slave pen in the capital. How he got there was ever a mystery to him, but evidently he had been drugged. He was taken South and sold to a hard master, with whom he remained twelve years before he was able to effect his release.[1] In the South any free Negro who entertained a runaway might himself become a slave; thus in South Carolina in 1827 a free woman with her three children suffered this penalty because she gave succor to two homeless and fugitive children six and nine years old.

[Footnote 1: McDougall: Fugitive Slaves, 36-37.]

Day by day, moreover, from the capital of the nation went on the internal slave-trade. "When by one means and another a dealer had gathered twenty or more likely young Negro men and girls, he would bring them forth from their cells; would huddle the women and young children into a cart or wagon; would handcuff the men in pairs, the right hand of one to the left hand of another; make the handcuffs fast to a long chain which pa.s.sed between each pair of slaves, and would start his procession southward."[1] It is not strange that several of the unfortunate people committed suicide. One distracted mother, about to be separated from her loved ones, dumbfounded the nation by hurling herself from the window of a prison in the capital on the Sabbath day and dying in the street below.

[Footnote 1: McMaster, V, 219-220.]

Meanwhile even in the free states the disabilities of the Negro continued. In general he was denied the elective franchise, the right of pet.i.tion, the right to enter public conveyances or places of amus.e.m.e.nt, and he was driven into a status of contempt by being shut out from the army and the militia. He had to face all sorts of impediments in getting education or in pursuing honest industry; he had nothing whatever to do with the administration of justice; and generally he was subject to insult and outrage.

One might have supposed that on all this proscription and denial of the ordinary rights of human beings the Christian Church would have taken a positive stand. Unfortunately, as so often happens, it was on the side of property and vested interest rather than on that of the oppressed. We have already seen that Southern divines held slaves and countenanced the system; and by 1840 James G. Birney had abundant material for his indictment, "The American Churches the Bulwarks of American Slavery."

He showed among other things that while in 1780 the Methodist Episcopal Church had opposed slavery and in 1784 had given a slaveholder one month to repent or withdraw from its conferences, by 1836 it had so drifted away from its original position as to disclaim "any right, wish, or intention to interfere in the civil and political relation between master and slave, as it existed in the slaveholding states of the union." Meanwhile in the churches of the North there was the most insulting discrimination; in the Baptist Church in Hartford the pews for Negroes were boarded up in front, and in Stonington, Conn., the floor was cut out of a Negro's pew by order of the church authorities. In Boston, in a church that did not welcome and that made little provision for Negroes, a consecrated deacon invited into his own pew some Negro people, whereupon he lost the right to hold a pew in his church. He decided that there should be some place where there might be more freedom of thought and genuine Christianity, he brought others into the plan, and the effort that he put forth resulted in what has since become the Tremont Temple Baptist Church.

Into all this proscription, burlesque, and crime, and denial of the fundamental principles of Christianity, suddenly came the program of the Abolitionists; and it spoke with tongues of fire, and had all the vigor and force of a crusade.

2. _The Challenge of the Abolitionists_

The great difference between the early abolition societies which resulted in the American Convention and the later anti-slavery movement of which Garrison was the representative figure was the difference between a humanitarian impulse tempered by expediency and one that had all the power of a direct challenge. Before 1831 "in the South the societies were more numerous, the members no less earnest, and the hatred of slavery no less bitter,... yet the conciliation and persuasion so noticeable in the earlier period in twenty years accomplished practically nothing either in legislation or in the education of public sentiment; while gradual changes in economic conditions at the South caused the question to grow more difficult."[1] Moreover, "the evidence of open-mindedness can not stand against the many instances of absolute refusal to permit argument against slavery. In the Colonial Congress, in the Confederation, in the Const.i.tutional Convention, in the state ratifying conventions, in the early Congresses, there were many vehement denunciations of anything which seemed to have an anti-slavery tendency, and wholesale suspicion of the North at all times when the subject was opened."[2] One can not forget the effort of James G. Birney, or that Benjamin Lundy's work was most largely done in what we should now call the South, or that between 1815 and 1828 at least four journals which avowed the extinction of slavery as one, if not the chief one, of their objects were published in the Southern states.[3] Only gradual emanc.i.p.ation, however, found any real support in the South; and, as compared with the work of Garrison, even that of Lundy appears in the distance with something of the mildness of "sweetness and light." Even before the rise of Garrison, Robert James Turnbull of South Carolina, under the name of "Brutus," wrote a virulent attack on anti-slavery; and Representative Drayton of the same state, speaking in Congress in 1828, said, "Much as we love our country, we would rather see our cities in flames, our plains drenched in blood--rather endure all the calamities of civil war, than parley for an instant upon the right of any power, than our own to interfere with the regulation of our slaves."[4] More and more this was to be the real sentiment of the South, and in the face of this kind of eloquence and pa.s.sion mere academic discussion was powerless.

[Footnote 1: Adams: _The Neglected Period of Anti-Slavery, 1808-1831_, 250-251.]

[Footnote 2: _Ibid_., 110.]

[Footnote 3: William Birney: _James G. Birney and His Times_, 85-86.]

[Footnote 4: Register of Debates, _4,975_, cited by Adams, 112-3.]

The _Liberator_ was begun January 1, 1831. The next year Garrison was the leading spirit in the formation of the New England Anti-Slavery Society; and in December, 1833, in Philadelphia, the American Anti-Slavery Society was organized. In large measure these organizations were an outgrowth of the great liberal and humanitarian spirit that by 1830 had become manifest in both Europe and America. Hugo and Mazzini, Byron and Macaulay had all now appeared upon the scene, and romanticism was regnant. James Montgomery and William Faber wrote their hymns, and Reginald Heber went as a missionary bishop to India. Forty years afterwards the French Revolution was bearing fruit. France herself had a new revolution in 1830, and in this same year the kingdom of Belgium was born. In England there was the remarkable reign of William IV, which within the short s.p.a.ce of seven years summed up in legislation reforms that had been agitated for decades. In 1832 came the great Reform Bill, in 1833 the abolition of slavery in English dominions, and in 1834 a revision of factory legislation and the poor law. Charles d.i.c.kens and Elizabeth Barrett Browning began to be heard, and in 1834 came to America George Thompson, a powerful and refined speaker who had had much to do with the English agitation against slavery. The young republic of the United States, l.u.s.ty and self-confident, was seething with new thought. In New England the humanitarian movement that so largely began with the Unitarianism of Channing "ran through its later phase in transcendentalism, and spent its last strength in the anti-slavery agitation and the enthusiasms of the Civil War."[1] The movement was contemporary with the preaching of many novel gospels in religion, in sociology, in science, education, and medicine. New sects were formed, like the Universalists, the Spiritualists, the Second Adventists, the Mormons, and the Shakers, some of which believed in trances and miracles, others in the quick coming of Christ, and still others in the reorganization of society; and the pseudo-sciences, like mesmerism and phrenology, had numerous followers. The ferment has long since subsided, and much that was then seething has since gone off in vapor; but when all that was spurious has been rejected, we find that the general impulse was but a new baptism of the old Puritan spirit.

Transcendentalism appealed to the private consciousness as the sole standard of truth and right. With kindred movements it served to quicken the ethical sense of a nation that was fast becoming materialistic and to nerve it for the conflict that sooner or later had to come.

[Footnote 1: Henry A. Beers: _Initial Studies in American Letters_, 95-98 pa.s.sim.]

In his salutatory editorial Garrison said with reference to his position: "In Park Street Church, on the Fourth of July, 1829, in an address on slavery, I unreflectingly a.s.sented to the popular but pernicious doctrine of gradual abolition. I seize this opportunity to make a full and unequivocal recantation, and thus publicly to ask pardon of my G.o.d, of my country, and of my brethren, the poor slaves, for having uttered a sentiment so full of timidity, injustice, and absurdity.... I am aware that many object to the severity of my language; but is there not cause for severity? I will be as harsh as truth, and as uncompromising as justice. On this subject, I do not wish to think, or speak, or write, with moderation. No! no! Tell a man whose house is on fire, to give a moderate alarm; tell him to moderately rescue his wife from the hands of the ravisher; tell the mother to gradually extricate her babe from the fire into which it has fallen; but urge me not to use moderation in a cause like the present! I am in earnest. I will not equivocate--I will not excuse--I will not retreat a single inch--AND I WILL BE HEARD." With something of the egotism that comes of courage in a holy cause, he said: "On this question my influence, humble as it is, is felt at this moment to a considerable extent, and shall be felt in coming years--not perniciously, but beneficially--not as a curse, but as a blessing; and POSTERITY WILL BEAR TESTIMONY THAT I WAS RIGHT."

All the while, in speaking to the Negro people themselves, Garrison endeavored to beckon them to the highest possible ground of personal and racial self-respect. Especially did he advise them to seek the virtues of education and cooperation. Said he to them:[1] "Support each other.... When I say 'support each other,' I mean, sell to each other, and buy of each other, in preference to the whites. This is a duty: the whites do not trade with you; why should you give them your patronage?

If one of your number opens a little shop, do not pa.s.s it by to give your money to a white shopkeeper. If any has a trade, employ him as often as possible. If any is a good teacher, send your children to him, and be proud that he is one of your color.... Maintain your rights, in all cases, and at whatever expense.... Wherever you are allowed to vote, see that your names are put on the lists of voters, and go to the polls.

If you are not strong enough to choose a man of your own color, give your votes to those who are friendly to your cause; but, if possible, elect intelligent and respectable colored men. I do not despair of seeing the time when our State and National a.s.semblies will contain a fair proportion of colored representatives--especially if the proposed college at New Haven goes into successful operation. Will you despair now so many champions are coming to your help, and the trump of jubilee is sounding long and loud; when is heard a voice from the East, a voice from the West, a voice from the North, a voice from the South, crying, _Liberty and Equality now, Liberty and Equality forever_! Will you despair, seeing Truth, and Justice, and Mercy, and G.o.d, and Christ, and the Holy Ghost, are on your side? Oh, no--never, never despair of the complete attainment of your rights!"

[Footnote 1: "An Address delivered before the Free People of Color in Philadelphia, New York, and other cities, during the month of June, 1831, by Wm. Lloyd Garrison. Boston, 1831," pp. 14-18.]

To second such sentiments rose a remarkable group of men and women, among them Elijah P. Lovejoy, Wendell Phillips, Theodore Parker, John Greenleaf Whittier, Lydia Maria Child, Samuel J. May, William Jay, Charles Sumner, Henry Ward Beecher, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and John Brown. Phillips, the "Plumed Knight" of the cause, closed his law office because he was not willing to swear that he would support the Const.i.tution; he relinquished the franchise because he did not wish to have any responsibility for a government that countenanced slavery; and he lost sympathy with the Christian Church because of its compromising att.i.tude. Garrison himself termed the Const.i.tution "a covenant with death and an agreement with h.e.l.l." Lydia Maria Child in 1833 published an _Appeal in Favor of That Cla.s.s of Americans Called Africans_, and wrote or edited numerous other books for the cause, while the anti-slavery poems of Whittier are now a part of the main stream of American literature. The Abolitionists repelled many conservative men by their refusal to countenance any laws that recognized slavery; but they gained force when Congress denied them the right of pet.i.tion and when President Jackson refused them the use of the mails.

There could be no question as to the directness of their attack. They held up the slaveholder to scorn. They gave thousands of examples of the inhumanity of the system of slavery, publis.h.i.+ng scores and even hundreds of tracts and pamphlets. They called the attention of America to the slave who for running away was for five days buried in the ground up to his chin with his arms tied behind him; to women who were whipped because they did not breed fast enough or would not yield to the l.u.s.t of planters or overseers; to men who were tied to be whipped and then left bleeding, or who were branded with hot irons, or forced to wear iron yokes and clogs and bells; to the Presbyterian preacher in Georgia who tortured a slave until he died; to a woman in New Jersey who was "bound to a log, and scored with a knife, in a shocking manner, across her back, and the gashes stuffed with salt, after which she was tied to a post in a cellar, where, after suffering three days, death kindly terminated her misery"; and finally to the fact that even when slaves were dead they were not left in peace, as the South Carolina Medical College in Charleston advertised that the bodies were used for dissection.[1] In the face of such an indictment the South appeared more injured and innocent than ever, and said that evils had been greatly exaggerated. Perhaps in some instances they were; but the South and everybody also knew that no pen could nearly do justice to some of the things that were possible under the iniquitous and abominable system of American slavery.

[Footnote 1: See "American Slavery as it is: Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses. By Theodore Dwight Weld. Published by the American Anti-Slavery Society, New York, 1839"; but the account of the New Jersey woman is from "A Portraiture of Domestic Slavery in the United States, by Jesse Torrey, b.a.l.l.ston Spa, Penn., 1917," p. 67.]