REGENERATION
"Evil is good in the making," says the optimist philosopher. Even the
more sober view of life reveals
That men may rise on stepping-stones
Of their dead selves to higher things.
Out of the calamities and horrors of war came to the nation a larger
life. Communities had been lifted out of pettiness, churches had half
forgotten their sectarianism, to millions of souls a sublimer meaning in
life had been disclosed. Lowell said it in two lines:
Earth's biggest country's got her soul,
And risen up earth's greatest nation.
The South had suffered far more than the North, and the South reaped the
larger profit. The fallacy of the old Southern civilization had been the
idea that labor is a curse and is to be shirked on to somebody else.
Overthrow and impoverishment brought labor as a necessity to every one,
and slowly it was revealed as a blessing.
When General Lee, stately in figure and bearing and splendid in dress,
met in surrender the sturdy Grant, in worn and homely service uniform,
it was emblematic of the yielding of the aristocratic order to the
industrial democracy. There was significance in the victor's kindly
words,--"Let your soldiers keep their horses; they will need them when
they get home for the spring plowing." That was it,--they turned from
chargers to plow-horses, and much to their safety and gain. Their
masters, too, from fighters became toilers, and if it seemed a fall it
proved a rise.
Before long on the street cars of Charleston and New Orleans were seen
young men of good family as drivers and conductors. Anything for an
honest living! Our fine old friend, Thomas Dabney, had been ruined along
with everybody else. He and his family undauntedly set themselves to do
their own household work. General Sherman was reported to have said, "It
would be a good thing if this sent every Southern woman to the
wash-tub." "Did Sherman say that?" said Dabney; "he shall not send my
daughters to the wash-tub!" and the old hero turned laundry-man for the
family as long as the need lasted. But the educated class soon found
fitter work than as laundry-men or car conductors. The more exacting
places called for occupants. There was a great enlistment in the ranks
of teachers. Lee took the presidency of Washington university and gave
to its duties the same whole-hearted service, the same punctilious care,
that he had given to the command of the army of Northern Virginia. In
peace as in war he was an exemplar to his countrymen,--and his
countrymen now were spread from Maine to California.
But what was to be the fate of the emancipated negro? Jefferson had
believed that he must be sent back to Africa. "Colonization" had been
the watchword of Southern emancipators, so long as there were any. Even
Lincoln apparently looked to that. But wholesale colonization was
clearly impossible. The freedmen neither could nor would be transported
in a body to Africa. And had it been possible it would have stripped the
land of laborers and left it a waste.
The South's assumption was that the negro was intrinsically an inferior
and must be kept subordinate to the white man. The North, in its
management of political reconstruction, had practically assumed that the
negro was the equal of the white man and was so to be treated. There was
a third view of the matter,--that the negro was at an inferior stage of
manhood, and the necessary task was to develop him. He is a man, but an
imperfect man,--make him a whole man. To that end some of the finest
forces of the nation were now directed. But the invigorating and
commanding spirit, who conceived the saving idea, put it into practice,
and gave guidance and inspiration to both races,--the man who found the
way out was Samuel Chapman Armstrong.
He came of Scotch-Irish blood, and of sturdy farming stock, bred in the
fertile fields of Pennsylvania and in the best traditions of
Christianity. His father and mother gave themselves to the missionary
work, in that lofty enthusiasm whose wave swept through the country
early in the nineteenth century. The boy was born in 1839 in the
Hawaiian Islands, and grew up in the joy-giving climate, with a happy
boy-life, swimming the sea and climbing the mountains; trained firmly
and kindly in obedience and service; impressed by the constant presence
in the home of unselfish and consecrated lives. As he grew older, his
bright eyes studied the native character, emotional, genial, unstable;
he saw the wholesale conversions to Christianity, speedy, happy, and
well-nigh barren of fruit. Going to America for his education, he
completed it at Williams College under the presidency of Mark Hopkins.
Garfield said that his conception of a university was a pine bench with
Mark Hopkins at one end and a student at the other. He gave a stimulus
alike intellectual and moral; his special teaching was in philosophy,
broadly reasoned, nobly aimed, closely applied to the daily need.
Armstrong spoke of him in later years as his spiritual father.
Graduating in 1862, he enlisted in the Union army, took his share in
Gettysburg and other fights, became an officer of negro troops, and rose
to a brigadier-generalship. He said that to him, born abroad, the cause
of Union made no strong appeal,--what he was fighting for was the
freedom of the slaves. The war finished, he left the army, entered the
service of the Freedmen's Bureau under General Oliver O. Howard, and was
assigned to the Jamestown peninsula in Virginia. There were huddled
together thousands of the freedmen,--the unconscious cause of the war,
the problem of the future,--simple, half-dazed, a mixture of good and
bad, of physical strength, kindly temper, crude morals and childish
ignorance. For a time the officials of the Bureau, as best they could,
kept order, found work, settled quarrels, and promoted schools. But what
was to be the large outcome?
Armstrong had been known to his associates as a man of splendid and
many-sided vitality. A college classmate, Dr. John Denison, graphically
describes him, "A sort of cataclysm of health, like other cyclones from
the South seas"; what the Tennessee mountaineers call "plumb
survigrous"; an islander, with the high courage and jollity of the tar;
"a kind of mental as well as physical amphibiousness." Extraordinary in
his training and versatility; able to "manage a boat in a storm, teach a
school, edit a newspaper, assist in carrying on a government, take up a
mechanical industry at will, understand the natives, sympathize with the
missionaries, talk with profound theorists, recite well in Greek or
mathematics, conduct an advanced class in geometry, and make no end of
fun for little children." He had had the training of a missionary
station in a Robinson Crusoe-like variety of functions. A knight-errant
to the core, the atmosphere of Williams under Hopkins gave him his
consecration. His comrades recognized him as an intellectual leader,
essentially religious but often startlingly unconventional, "under
great terrestrial headway," "the most strenuous man I ever saw." He said
of himself: "missionary or pirate."
Now after the sobering of three years of campaigning his immediate
duties brought him face to face with the tremendous problem of the
negro, and the elements of the solution already lay in his own
character, experience, personality.
What were the assets of the negro? He had, by inheritance and training,
the capacity and instinct of labor. What an advantage that is appears by
the contrast with the Indian, who is perishing for want of just that.
But the negro knew labor only as the hard necessity of his lot,--it had
to him no higher significance. "Education," was the watchword of the
generous spirits of another race who were coming to his help. They found
at first great promise in the freedman's eagerness to learn reading and
writing. But it soon appeared that this was an outreaching toward some
vague social advantage, and that the actual acquisition through speller
and copybook carried him and his children but a little way up. It was a
pressing necessity to provide teachers, and of his own race; so, rightly
and naturally, were founded the normal school and the college. He needed
his own educated preachers, physicians, lawyers; for these, too, there
must be training. So, rightly and naturally, were planted
universities,--Atlanta, Fisk, Howard. It was an unquestioned creed that
the white man's training as preacher, lawyer, physician, teacher, must
begin with years of Latin and Greek; so what other way for the negro?
So, as almost inevitable, the early education of the race began as a
copy of the white man's methods. But sadly inadequate, alas, as we begin
to see, is a classical education for the typical white man of our time;
and immense was the gap between the teaching of which that was the core
and crown, and the wants of the black field-hands and their children.
Labor, education,--and what of religion? The slave had found in
Christianity, often in rude, half-barbaric forms, a consolation, a
refuge, a tenderness and hope, to which we can scarcely do justice.
Perhaps its most eloquent expression to our imagination is those
wonderful old-time melodies, the negro "spirituals," as they have been
made familiar by the singers of the negro colleges. Their words are
mystic, Scriptural, grotesque; the melodies have a pathos, a charm, a
moving power, born out of the heart's depths through centuries of sorrow
dimly lighted by glimmerings of a divine love and hope. The typical
African temperament, the tragedy of bondage, the tenderness and triumph
of religion, find voice in those psalms.
Religion is not to be despised because it is not altogether or even
largely ethical. The heart depressed by drudgery, hardship, forlornness,
craves not merely moral guidance but exhilaration and ecstacy. Small
wonder if it seeks it in whisky; better surely if it finds it in hymns
and prayers and transports partly of the flesh yet touched by the
spirit. Further, by faithful masters and mistresses there was given to
the slave's religion, in many cases, a clear and strong sense of moral
obligation. Uncle Tom in his saintliness may be an idealization, but the
elements were drawn from life.
Yet the slave's and so the freedman's religion was very one-sided and
out of all proportion emotional. Its habitual aim was occasional
transport on earth and rapture in heaven. Of the day's task, of homely
fidelities and services, of marriage and parenthood and neighborhood and
citizenship, it made almost no account.
Face to face with these impoverished and groping souls, what had
Armstrong, in his experience, knowledge, personality, with which to
meet them? "He was filled through and through"--the quotation is from
the admirable biographical sketch by his daughter--"with a deep sense
that by hard work alone can any of us be saved--a sense based on many
obscure foundations of observation and deduction. Away back in the
corners of his mind were recollections of sundry wood-choppings and
milkings carried on under protest by himself and his companions; and
knowledge, too, of how his father and mother had spent their ambitious
youth in work, the mother spinning by the fireside, the father doing
chores at his home in Pennsylvania. It was the boys who faced and
conquered hard physical jobs that became the men of endurance later." He
had seen and shared the devotion of the missionary spirit, and had seen,
too, how largely it failed of fruit by being spent on supernatural
conversion and mystical emotion. He knew the tropical temperament,
common to Hawaiian and negro,--how accessible to transient fervor, how
deficient in persistence and continuity. He had watched his father's
operations, as minister of public instruction under the Hawaiian king;
his experiments in more practical and prosaic education and religion,
half frowned on by the ecclesiastics of America, but rich in suggestion.
He knew that the Hilo manual labor school, where the boys paid their
expenses by labor, slightly trained, was a marked success. His intensely
active nature had caught from Hopkins the philosophic outlook, and the
human materials were before him in rich abundance. Above all, while
unspeculative in religion, and content to employ its traditional
forms,--"they're imperfect enough," he said, "but they're the best we've
got"--the instincts of his great and disciplined nature sent him
straight to the central realities of character, which are the true
foundations of society.
His ideal crystallized by that swift and sudden process in which the
long subconscious growth of the mind sometimes comes to fruitage. He
said in later years that before he entered the Bureau's service, while
sailing on a troop-ship to Texas, he saw as in a dream his school much
as it afterward became. Twice afterward the vision came to him.
Stationed at Hampton in 1866, while he was bringing order out of the
chaos around him, his mind was reaching forward surely and swiftly to
his larger project.
This was the germ thought: Character is to get its direction and energy
in the day's work. Just as man's physical needs drive him to toil, his
spiritual necessities find their best field and cultivation in the same
toil. The freedmen's first need is to earn a living; then to acquire
such a margin as will allow some little ease and comfort and refinement;
and along with these goes the need of good habits, high aims,
disciplined character. Teach the industrial lesson and the moral lesson
together. Train them to work intelligently and cheerfully; teach them at
the same time whatever of book knowledge best fits their need; and
constantly inspire them with the spirit of service to their kind.
Provide in this way for some hundreds of young men and women, who shall
go out as teachers to educate and train their people along these lines.
That was the ideal,--the germ of Hampton, of Tuskegee, of the new
education of the negro; the suggestion and stimulant of the new
education as it is coming to be for the white.