in. However much may be done by others, however much a secular
education may attempt to accomplish, it can never cover the ground
that is absolutely necessary. We have a secular education in the
North, and it is doing much, but it has never done a religious
work; nor will it ever do such in the future. We cannot expect
that it should; and we feel a peculiar sensitiveness in this
matter,—perhaps a sensitiveness that is not too great. We cannot
trust the State to educate our young religiously. I, for one,
confess a profound distrust of all State universities. I too often
have seen those universities, in their attempt to be non-sectarian,
ministering to the interests of that intensest of sectaries—the
infidel. I will go even further than this, although I may carry but
few of you with me in this conviction. I fear the methods of higher
education in our high schools are not always what they should be.
I have too often seen those who were the disciples of Huxley and
Tyndall in science, and of Spencer and of Taine in sociology,
literature and history, teaching their pupils doctrines that were
insidious in their religious influence. I should be glad for one to
see a return to the old-time academy system of New England, under
which students who valued education enough to pay for it, were
taught all branches of a higher learning on a Christian foundation,
and trained first of all and most of all in character building.
But whatever you may say in regard to this matter, I am sure that
I shall carry you with me in this conviction, that in the South,
in our labor among the blacks, our institutions must be of this
character and can be of no other. We must have institutions that
shall furnish Christian homes. Those who come to our institutions,
come from places where they have no such Christian training as
have most of those who are in public schools in this more favored
portion of the land; and those in the South, if they are to have
a Christian training at all, must have it in schools that are
under the management of Christian men, in chartered and endowed
institutions, cared for by Christian boards of trustees. It is this
Association that is doing precisely this kind of work; and this
Association and others like it will, I firmly believe, be called on
by God for years to come to labor with the same devotedness as they
have in the past for the salvation of the land.
My friends, our land is in danger. I am profoundly moved with an
anxiety for a land which should be dearer to us than life. It has
seemed to me, as I have looked over this broad extent of country,
that there were flames of fraud and violence springing up here and
there, that were working disaster to our republic, and that would
in time—if we may judge by the history of other republics that have
been similarly controlled by evil influences, as France in the last
century and Spain in this, and Greece and Rome in the centuries
gone by—bring this our beloved land to wreck and ruin. And yet
we have a God above, and He has given us methods of fighting the
flames.
This summer the woods of New Jersey were all ablaze, and the
farmers went out into the forests to fight the fire that they might
save their homes and their property from desolation; and the method
they pursued was this: to build against those fires a back fire
that should rage more furiously and destroy the other flame as it
advanced. It is your business and mine to
“Take up the torch of truth
And wave it wide,”
to take up this blessed Gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ and carry
it all through the South, and touch points here and there until at
length we have the fires blazing all over the land, and ignorance
is dispersed in the light of the Gospel. Already, in almost
every Southern State, these fires are lighted and the work goes
gloriously on. Let us not lose heart, but thank God that He has
given us the privilege of joining in this grand work.
* * * * *
A SAMPLE STATE.
PRES. H. S. DE FOREST, TALLADEGA, ALA.
Our Southern States are so much alike, our work, its difficulties,
its successes, its necessities are so similar, that a view of one
part of the Southern Field will stand for all. Burke’s study motto,
“From one learn all,” I think is applicable to the question before
us. If, therefore, for the few minutes I am before you, I shall
speak of one State only, and of the work of the Association in that
State, it is not because it is more important than in neighboring
States, nor because the work is more hopeful, but because for a few
months I have been learning something there of our need and of our
opportunities.
On that map, you see Georgia facing east to the sunrise, and
northward toward New England. Behind Georgia, with its back close
to Mississippi, where flows the Yazoo river, is the State of
Alabama, in which about half of the population is colored. Ten
years ago there were 475,510 colored men there, when our entire
population was not quite one million. If we now look at the field,
its condition is, perhaps, what you might expect. Bear in mind that
there were no free schools there until after the reconstruction;
that our New England ideas are exotics and grow there with
difficulty; that twenty years ago, these colored men were all
slaves and it was a crime to teach them; and you are prepared to
believe such facts as these. Of our black population of nearly
500,000 there are 168,000 of school age; and now you ask how many
after seventeen years of freedom are cared for. Recent statistics
show that of this number there were 54,000 enrolled as pupils and
40,000 in actual attendance. You see a company of black youth on
the street, and there is about one in three of them on the road
to school, and about one in four who will enter the school-house.
School-houses with us are not as numerous as at the West. On
that grand and growing frontier, the white painted school-house
anticipates the coming of the settler, and often the first building
put up is a hall for learning. You may go through that dark
State of Alabama, and travel far and wide, and not see a public
school-house. Alphabetically Alabama leads the van of the States.
She does not, however, in letters. The entire school year is about
eighty-two days, and the teachers are paid upon an average $22.65 a
month. We have never come to the taxing of property for education.
Nothing but the poll tax of our State goes for our free schools,
and the black man’s head-tax goes for the colored schools, and the
white man’s head-tax for the white schools. You are prepared to
believe, then, that our appropriation for each pupil is only $1.06.
That is about two cents a week per pupil.
It is evident, then, that education is at a low ebb in that dark
State of Alabama; and such as we have, bear in mind, is the growth
of the last twenty years. It is an infusion of Northern ideas and
Northern civilization; and these first friends of learning must
be its friends still. Just now I remember calling but a few weeks
since at an important point where two railroads cross each other,
where iron and coal lie side by side, where different forms of
industry,—blast furnaces and machine shops—are going up, and it is
a place of great prospective importance that we ought at once to
occupy. I called upon the county superintendent of education, a
rebel colonel, I think six feet and more in height. He seemed to
look down upon me. I am sure he did when I announced myself from
Talladega. He at once branded me with “N.T.”—that means a Negro
Teacher, with two g’s in the word Negro. I asked him concerning the
education of the black man in that growing town. He said he knew
very little of it; he paid out ninety dollars of public money for
a teacher, but he knew nothing more. Said he, “We don’t think much
of nigger education here.” It almost took my breath away. I said
to him there might be others in the town who had different views
of negro education, and asked him if there was not some friend of
liberty with whom I might speak; and he replied, “We have not much
of the nigger about us;” and I went out. Now it is very evident, my
friends, that the work of education, so imperative, must be carried
forward by Northern consecration still.
Well, if you now turn from our intellectual need to our industrial
wants, I can show you a State whose mines and hills are full of
treasure, where forest trees grow in rank luxuriance, where our
cotton fields are sufficient to wrap half America in their folds.
And yet our homes are mean and miserable, and dark and dirty, and
there is physical want and physical poverty and physical distress.
You tell me the black man is indolent. I say yes, but he is among
a lazy generation. You tell me the black man is thriftless, and
I say yes, but he is among a shiftless race. It is true that the
industrial idea of those Southern States must be carried forward,
and we must do it.
But the wants that I have referred to thus far are not our most
serious need. We come to manhood, to morality, to Christian virtue,
and there, brethren, we are just where you might suspect. Bear
in mind, it is but a few years since slavery, the sum and the
mother of villainies, was sustained by the law and defended by the
pulpit. The piety and the morality of the colored people have been
strangely divorced. As was said here yesterday, we are not opposed
by skepticism. I grant it; we can subscribe to the whole catechism
and take it in bodily, with one exception, and that exception is
the Ten Commandments.
Now, “from one,” as Burke said, “learn all.” Let me tell you
two or three facts that in my mind stand for a great deal.
Recently a Doctor of Divinity, a foremost man in the Southern
Presbyterian church, told me that near the city where he lives he
has a plantation where he often spends a few days at a time, and
preaches. That minister, like others, wants his Aaron and Hur about
him. There is a church established there, and on his right hand was
a colored minister, and on the left a deacon. That minister had
three living wives. That deacon was a butcher, and lately there
were dug up out of his barnyard the skins of fifteen cattle that he
had stolen.
The facts concerning Southern churches are not well recognized, I
suspect, at the North. A recent letter from one of our most trusted
young men, told me that where he was working this summer as a
teacher there are two colored churches, and that a woman, excluded
from one of them on the Lord’s day because of her gross immorality,
was on the next Sabbath received into the other church without a
letter; and this represents the type of Southern black piety.
Brethren, I have come to believe that the seventy-three
Congregational churches that you have planted there stand like
light-houses in the midst of surrounding darkness. And another fact
means much to my mind. When the census agents were with us, and our
young men were arranged in the parlor for convenience, the officers
asked them their fathers’ names. Some of the young men blushed as
they gave them, and others handed them in on bits of paper. Young
men of high character, students in our theological seminary, were
born out of wedlock. They blushed at the infamy, and their blushing
was because of Anglo-Saxon blood that was wickedly in their veins.
I tell you, brethren, if you should reverse the course of the
Queen of the South, and instead of going to the North you should
go to the South, you would say with her, though in a different
sense, that the half had not been told. It is fair to believe,
then, that the Christian work of the South is most imperative, and
I am glad to turn from the wants of the field to something of our
undertakings. * * * * * *
Is it strange, then, that those of us who are allowed once more
to face the front, and go personally into the conflict hand to
hand, are looking Northward for supplies? I can remember, when
we stood there in hours of need, how the Northern people did not
withhold munitions of war or what was necessary for our comfort.
We are engaged in the same warfare, and we need a large supply of
munitions.
It is not seven days since, at New Haven, under the elms that
shade Yale College, I saw light-bearers in martial array passing
through the streets, and, when the band struck up the music that I
heard once on the tented field at the South, my heart grew large.
When I saw the marshaling of soldiers as in battle array, I thought
of what I had seen at Cold Harbor, at Drury’s Bluff, at Richmond,
and at Petersburg. They went on in the mimicry of war with mounted
men, and my heart was full. But soon came a noble battalion of
black men, side by side, step by step with their brethren, looking
as grand as any of them, with their lighted torches going on
towards the front. I saw there a parable. There is Alabama and the
South, there is the Dark Continent with a sixth of the population
of the globe, 186,000,000 waiting for the Gospel. Now, then, shall
we fill those torches with oil and light them? We have men ready to
be trained to go there, and, believe me, they will not only bless
Africa, but do a large part in saving America.
Do you remember, my friends, that the oldest monuments we have,
the most ancient coins that come down to us, represent the negro
kneeling before his captor, with his hands clasped in petition, yet
wearing shackles, and there kneeling in prayer to an enemy? That is
the old picture of Africa that has come down through the sun-burnt
ages. How is it to-day? Thank God, in our country the scene has
changed. The black man is not kneeling before his captor. He stands
erect with us, and with us he stands close to the ballot box. Those
shackles are broken—do I say broken? No, they were cut asunder by
the red sword of war, but still they lie at his feet. Those hands
are not clasped now, but open, and they are extended, not to his
captor, but to his old-time friends and liberators, to Christian
men and women of the North. He holds in one hand a spelling-book
and a Bible, and he stretches it out to us and says, “Come and
teach me.” Brethren, it is blessed to hear that call. It is blessed
to have a share in that work.
* * * * *
REPORT OF COMMITTEE ON CHURCH WORK.
The Committee upon Church Work would emphasize the fact that
the religious work among the Freedmen is essentially that of
reformation. The churches of this Association are the Reformed
Churches of the South. Incidentally, they are Congregational. The
reason which called them into existence, and which justifies their
separate organization, is the demand for a pure, intelligent,
progressive Christianity. The Association steadily refuses to
multiply churches, or to increase their membership, except as the
true type of personal piety can be established and maintained.
And, acting upon this principle, the growth of the church is made
to depend upon the material which can be prepared for it; in other
words, the church is essentially the product of the school. There
only can the foundations be laid for an intelligent faith and a
pure morality.
Your Committee desire to commend the patient adherence, not only of
the Association, but of the churches themselves, to this principle.
They would also acknowledge with gratitude the prosperous condition
of the churches, as set forth in the more detailed reports
submitted. With hardly an exception, they are provided with houses
of worship, they are substantially free from debt, discipline has
been thoroughly maintained, mission work has been earnestly carried
on, benevolence has been largely increased, the pulpit has been
well supplied, and in many cases there have been most gracious
proofs of the special work of the Spirit of God.
The present number of churches is 73, an increase the last year of
5, with a present membership of nearly 5,000, an increase of 635.
The question of greatest urgency connected with the department of
Church Work, is that of education for the ministry.
Three of the schools have a theological department—Fisk,
Talladega, and Straight. There is also a theological department
connected with Howard University, partly under the care of the
Association. But no one of these has any endowment. No permanent
provision whatever has been made for the instruction or support
of those studying for the ministry. The work is carried on under
every possible disadvantage. Meanwhile, the demand for an educated
ministry is steadily and rapidly increasing. The work of education
has now reached the point where the ratio of increase will soon be
enormous. Over 150,000 children have been under instruction the
past year. The material for churches will soon be abundant. The
only question will be, can it be used?
Other denominations, too, are looking largely to the schools of the
Association for ministers. And England, in her missions for Africa,
naturally turns to the Freedmen of America for missionaries.
Your Committee would call the attention of the churches to the
growing prominence of the religious question at the South, and
would most earnestly advise the patrons of this Association to make
fit provision and endowment for the permanent work of educating men
for the ministry.
WM. J. TUCKER, _Chairman_.
* * * * *
OUR DISADVANTAGES AND ADVANTAGES.
FIELD SUP’T J. E. ROY, D.D.
Our church work at the South has its disadvantages, its advantages,
its obligations, its encouragements.
I.—ITS DISADVANTAGES.
1. One is that our church system is entirely unknown among the
Freedmen. It is a singular fact that they should know absolutely
nothing of the churches which had led in the anti-slavery reform,
and which, through this Association, are now, as is confessed on
all hands, doing more for the lifting up of these lowly poor than
any other. The occasion of this ignorance is at hand. The doctrine
of equality in Christ’s house, as based on his own words—“All ye
are brethren”—precluded the setting up of this order of church
life among a people, where master and slave should vote, side by
side, upon all church business. I know that it will be said at once
that the Baptists, with their congregational polity, did prevail
all over the South. But theirs was, after all, not a Christian
democracy, but an aristocracy of the white members. All right of
voting was denied the colored. Even those two much-praised ancient
Congregational churches at the South, the Circular in Charleston,
and the Dorchester in Liberty County, Georgia, which took root in
that soil, did so only by denying suffrage to the colored members.
When one of the pastors of the latter, with the Bible in one hand
and a whip in the other, drove his brethren as his slaves to their
tasks, if that had been a genuine Congregational church, an appeal
would have been taken to the brotherhood for an application of
that Scripture: “Masters, give unto your servants that which is
just and equal.” One of the colored members of that church, now
a worthy deacon, told me this bit of experience. His master, a
fellow church member, had found him with a Webster’s spelling book
in hand, trying to learn to read. For this crime he was tied down,
with his face to the ground, his hands and feet made fast to four
stakes, and then upon his bare back he received such a flagellation
that, under the torture, he cried out: “Oh, massa, do stop, and
I’ll never again look into a book as long as I live.” With a fine
turn he said to me, “I GRADULATED THEN.” Now, if that brother had
had the right of telling that trespass to the church, and if all
the members had had the privilege of voting upon the case, that
would have been a piece of pure Congregationalism. Evidently such
a church system could not obtain in a slaveholding community. So
it is entirely unknown in that region; and this fact becomes a
disadvantage in introducing it now.
2. Another disadvantage is that the Freedmen are so largely wedded
to other denominations. It is popular to belong to the church. The
mass, although they may not be members, will call themselves either
Baptists or Methodists. One of them on being asked, “Are you a
Christian?” responded: “No, Sah, I’se a Baptist.” The spectacular
element of immersion afforded by this church order, and the scope
given by the other to the emotional nature, have proven a great
attraction to these rude and simple souls. Then it is easy for
their zeal to rise into sectarianism and superstition, bitter and
hostile, such as leads them to denounce the new church as having
no religion, because it has no dreams and visions, no physical
contortions—such as lead them to sneer at our members as only
“Bible Christians,” while they have, instead, direct manifestations
of the Spirit. It is a surprising revelation to our teachers and
preachers who go to the South with nothing but love in their
hearts, and their hands full of the best things they could take, to
find such heat of sectarian opposition as soon as it is proposed
to set up the church life, which represents the educational effort
that is so highly prized.
3. Another disadvantage for the time in setting up our churches,
is the standard of intelligence and of morality to which we seek
to bring them. The colored man who confessed that he had broken
every one of the commandments, but blessed God that he had kept his
religion, stood in part, at least, for a good many of his people.
It is hard for us who come in contact with that state of things
to accept the facts. Even then we would not wish to take the risk
of making them public, only so far as is sustained by their own
newspapers and official reports. The saddest part of it is the
impropriety of the leaders, ministers, and official members. If
the blind lead the blind, both will fall into the ditch. Each,
in self-protection, condones the other’s guilt. We know that the
system of slaveholding is largely responsible for this divorce of
religion from morality. But the fact, as we have to confront it,
is all the same. If you propose to set up a church that shall be
clean and be kept clean, in pulpit and pew, you have undertaken a
difficult task. The gravity of depravity is against you.
II. ITS ADVANTAGES.
1. One is that our church system had not previously prevailed at
the South, to become modified by the influences of slaveholding,
and identified with it in the associations of the colored people.
As individuals become intelligent enough to rise above the
prevailing sectarianism; as they learn the anti-slavery history
of our churches; and as they learn that the nature of our polity
prevented it from coming South in the days of slavery, they turn
to the Puritan way with avidity. It is to them a new discovery
of friends, who had stood by them when they knew it not. Indeed,
these people, whose ancestors were landed upon these shores the
same year the Pilgrims came, appear to be the Yankees of the South.
They fall naturally into the observance of Thanksgiving, and on
that day they love to hear over and over the story of the Pilgrims
and Puritans, their exile, their hardships, their poverty, their
simplicity of life, their struggle for liberty. They soon learn
that the Puritan ideas have taken possession of the North, are
now penetrating the South, and are rising to a supremacy over the
nation. As they advance in understanding they take in these ideas;
and, more and more, will they be disposed to seek the church form
which represents them.
2. Another advantage is the adaptation of this church system as an
educating process for the colored people. Any one who considers the
untutored quality of the communities in which the Apostles planted
their self-governing churches, must give up the notion that they
were New England people. Indeed, as one becomes acquainted with
the qualities of mind and elements of character in these sable
Christians, he can see that the Epistles of the New Testament
were addressed to much the same sort of people. These can govern
themselves as well as those. And, coming forth from the house of
bondage, much more do they desire their largest liberty in Christ
Jesus. The working of this autonomy of the churches is to them an
educating process. It puts responsibility upon them. They must
study its principles in order to exercise its function. Even such
men as Senators Lamar, and Hampton, and Hendricks, in the _North
American_, have argued that the elective franchise is not only the
means of defense, but of education, among these new-made citizens.
Precisely so does it work in church relations. Some of us, who
have observed the process, have been surprised and delighted to
see with what decorum and parliamentary skill they will handle a
deliberative assembly. As, in the days of bondage, the only outlet
for their native talent was the pulpit; and as their church was
about their only arena for organic efficiency, so now they love
most of all to handle their church affairs. And so does their
self-governing fellowship become a means of education.