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[Illustration: UNCLE JEFF SHIELDS, LEXINGTON, VA.]
THE
OLD SOUTH
A Monograph
BY
H. M. HAMILL, D.D.
[Illustration: Decoration]
Smith & Lamar, Agents, Publishing House of the
· · · Methodist Episcopal Church, South · · ·
Dallas, Texas · · · Nashville, Tennessee
The subject-matter of this little book first took form in an address
before the students of Emory College, Oxford, Ga., in June, 1904. If
apology be needed for putting it in type, the writer finds it in the
request of an old woman, now eighty-six years of age, a true daughter
of the Old South, whose lightest wish has been the law of his life
for more than fifty years.
THE OLD SOUTH.
My theme is “The Old South.” I have no apology for those who may deem
it time-worn or obsolete. I am handicapped in beginning by memories
of other writers and speakers who have dealt more worthily than I can
hope to do with my subject. The Old South has not been wanting in men
to speak and write upon it. Friend and foe alike have exploited it.
It has been the burden of poetry not always inspired, and of oratory
not always inspiring. Not a few have been its critics who knew it
only by hearsay. Indeed, much of current literature upon the Old
South is from those who were born after it had passed away. I have
no fault to find with any who have thus written or spoken, however
worthily or unworthily, if only it was done in kindness. If over the
dust of the Old South, while discoursing upon its virtues or its
vices, any one has dealt generously with the one and fairly with the
other, I am content, though praise or blame may not always have been
wisely bestowed.
I was born in and of the Old South. At sixteen, after a year under
General Lee, I received my parole at Appomattox, and went home to
look upon the ruin of the Old South. Whatever is good or evil in me
I owe chiefly to that Old South. Habit, motive, ideal, ambition,
passion and prejudice, love and hatred, were formed in it and by
it. My life work as a man has been wrought under what is called the
New South, but inspiration and aspiration to it came out of the Old
South. The spell it cast upon my boyhood is strong upon me after
more than a generation has gone. It is not the spell of enchantment.
It has not blinded me to bad or good qualities, and after the lapse
of a half century and despite the tenderness for it that grows with
the passing years, I think I can see and judge the Old South and
give account of it more impartially than one who received it at
second-hand.
The Old South, in itself and apart from all other considerations,
will always be a profitable study. It is the one unique page of our
national history. Indeed, it comprehends two hundred and fifty years
of history with scarce a parallel. I think one will search in vain
history, ancient or modern, to find a likeness to the Old South,
socially, intellectually, politically, or religiously. I do not
wonder that romancer, poet, historian, and philosopher have gathered
from it material and inspiration. As a matter of fact, the past
decade has brought forth more literature concerning the Old South
than the entire generation which preceded it. Its body lies moldering
in the ground, but its soul goes marching on. Wherein especially was
it unique?
To begin with, it was in the South rather than the North that the
seed of American liberty was first planted. Jamestown, not Plymouth
Rock, was the matrix of true Americanism. Poet and orator have made
much of the rock-bound coast and savage wild to which the Puritan
fathers came, and have had little to say of the Cavaliers who fought
their way to conquest over savage beast and man. Winthrop, Standish,
and Cotton Mather are set forth by provincial and partisan writer
and speaker as exclusive national types of pioneer courage, wisdom,
and heroism. I have read more than one sneer in alleged national
histories against “the gentlemen of Jamestown,” of whom it was said
that there were “eleven laboring men and thirty-five gentlemen.” But
the historians who sneer fail to note how these same gentlemen felled
more trees and did more hard work than the men of the ax and pick.
Long after Jamestown had become a memory, I had seen the descendants
of those same derided gentlemen in the Army of Northern Virginia,
possessors of inherited wealth and reared to luxury from their
cradles, yet toiling in the trenches or tramping on the dusty highway
or charging into the mouth of cannon with unfailing cheerfulness.
I do not disparage the stern integrity and high achievement of the
Puritan sires. I gladly accord them a high place among the fathers
and founders of the republic. But putting Puritan and Cavalier
side by side, rating each fairly at his real worth and by what he
did to fix permanently the qualities that have made us great, I am
confident I could make good my proposition that deeper down at the
foundation of our greatness as a people than all other influences are
the qualities and spirit that have marked the Cavalier in the Old
World or the New.
[Illustration: AUNT HANNAH.]
Was it not in the Old South, for instance, that the first word
was spoken that fired the colonial heart and pointed the way to
freedom from the tyranny of Britain? Later, when all hearts along
the Atlantic seaboard were burning with hope of liberty, was it not
one from the Old South who presided over the fateful Congress that
finally broke with the mother country? And did not another from the
Old South frame the immortal declaration of national independence?
And when the hard struggle for liberty was begun, it was from the Old
South that a general was called to lead the ragged Continentals to
victory. Follow the progress of that war of the Revolution, and it
will be seen how in its darkest days the light of hope and courage
burned nowhere so bravely as in the Old South.
Seventy-two years and fifteen Presidents succeeded between the last
gun of the Revolution and the first gun fired upon Sumter in 1861.
Nine out of fifteen Presidents, and fifty of the seventy-two years,
are to be credited to the statesmanship of the Old South. What
Washington did with the sword for the young republic, Chief Justice
Marshall, of Virginia, made permanently secure by the wisdom of the
great jurist. After him came a long line of worthy successors from
the Old South, in the persons of judges, vice presidents, cabinet
officers, officers of the army and navy, who were called to serve
in the high places of the government. The fact is that whatever
unique quality of greatness and fame came to the republic for more
than a half century after it was begun was largely due to the wisdom
of Southern statesmanship. It is hard, I know, to credit such a
statement as to the dominating influence in our early national
history, now that nearly fifty years have passed since a genuine son
of the South has stood by the helm of the ship of State.
As with the statesmanship, so with the military leadership of the
Old South. The genius for war has been one of the gifts of the sons
of the South from the beginning, not only as fighters with a dash
that would have charmed the heart of Ney, but as born commanders,
tacticians, and strategists. In the two great wars of the republic,
Great Britain and Mexico were made to feel the skill and courage of
Southern general and rifleman. In the Civil War—greatest of modern
times, and in some respects greatest of all time—the greater generals
who commanded, as well as the Presidents who commissioned them, were
born on Southern soil, and carried into their high places the spirit
of the Old South. In the extension of the republic from the seaboard
to the great central valley, and beyond to the mountains and the
Pacific, Southern generalship and statesmanship led the way. The
purchase of Louisiana, the annexation of Texas and the Southwest,
were conceived and executed chiefly by Southern men.
So for more than fifty formative years of our history the Old South
was the dominating power in the nation, as it had been in the
foundation of the colonies out of which came the republic, and later
in fighting its battles of independence and in framing its policies
of government. And I make bold to reaffirm that whatever strength
or symmetry the republic had acquired at home, or reputation it had
achieved abroad, in those earlier crucial years of its history were
largely due to the patriotism and ability of Southern statesmanship.
Why that scepter of leadership has passed from its keeping, or why
the New South is no longer at the front of national leadership, is
a question that might well give pause to one who recalls the brave
days when the Old South sat at the head of the table and directed the
affairs of the nation.
Socially, the Old South, like “all Gaul,” was divided into three
parts—the slaveholding planters, the aristocrats of the social
system, few relatively in numbers but mighty in wealth and authority;
the negro slaves, who by the millions plowed and sowed its fields and
reaped its harvests, and who for hundreds of years, both in slavery
and freedom, have found contented homes in the South; and lastly the
nonslaveholding whites, a distinctly third estate.
The nonslaveholding white of the Old South was essentially _sui
generis_. He was really a vital part of a singular semifeudal system,
yet, as far as he could, he maintained his independence of it. He
was between two social fires. His lack of culture and breeding, his
rude speech and dress, barred him from the big house of the planter,
except as a sort of political dependent or henchman. On the other
hand, to the negro he was variously known as “poor folks,” “poor
white trash,” and at best as “half-strainers.” While there was not
a little in common between him and the master of slaves, he had
literally no dealings with the negro. Here and there, if one rose to
ownership of land or slaves by dint of extraordinary industry or good
fortune, his social position was scarcely improved. He became like
the shoddy “New Riches” of our own time, in a class to himself.
There are not a few illusions as to these “cracker” whites, which
fanciful magazine and dialect writers have helped to spread. A
benevolently intended effort has been in progress for a generation on
the part of certain sentimentalists, with more money than wisdom, to
civilize and Christianize what they are pleased to call the “mountain
whites.” One would gather from the pleas made before religious
conventions, and from the facile writers who have made these whites
their special care, that they have dwelt continually in religious
darkness and destitution, and greatly needed the alien missionary to
shed the effulgence of his superior civilization and Christianity
upon him. I think I am in a position to say that this forlorn and
destitute Southern mountaineer, true to his ancient characteristics,
has received these effusive visitors and their benevolences with one
eye partly closed and with continued cheerful expectoration at knot
holes in the neighboring fence. I am reminded of one of Bishop Hoss’s
repertoire of anecdotes, all of which have pith and point. Of such a
mountaineer as I am depicting, tall, lank, sinewy, frowzy, “a bunch
of steel springs and chicken hawk,” a tourist satirically inquired:
“May I ask, my friend, if you are a member of the human species?”
“No, by gum,” said the mountaineer; “I’m an East Tennesseean.”
As a matter of fact there are few people so thoroughly imbued with
the religious spirit as these same “cracker” mountain whites, though
it is a religion of the Old rather than of the New Testament, in
the crude ethics and doctrines which they commonly hold. Even the
Kentucky feudist is after a sort an Old Testament religionist,
who has not gone beyond the idea of the “blood avenger” of Mosaic
permission. Rude, uncouth, ignorant of books as the poor whites of
the Old South were and continue largely to be, I pay them the sincere
personal tribute of admiration for the homespun virtues that have
marked them as a peculiar people. For two years I lived in their
wildest mountain fastnesses, went in and out of their rude cabins,
taught their youth, broke bread at their tables, and worshiped
God with them in their log meetinghouses. I have earned a right,
therefore, by personal contact and knowledge to resent with warmth
the imputations under which the cracker white, highland or lowland,
is too often made to suffer. Even so distinguished an authority as
the _New York Advocate_, in a recent article devoted to this class,
permitted the usual distortion of fact in all things pertaining to
Southern problems.
Of this rude figure of the Old South, it is enough to say that no
hospitality of the plantation mansion ever eclipsed that of his
humble home to the man who sought shelter beneath it. If he never
forgave a wrong, he never forgot to repay a kindness. His honesty
was such that a man’s pocketbook was commonly as safe in the trail
of a mountaineer or lowlander as in the vault of a bank. If he had
not books or learning, there was something quite as good for his
uses which he had the knack of inheriting or acquiring—a home-grown
wit and shrewdness of judgment of men and things. Religiously,
he took his code and doctrines directly from the Bible, and too
often patterned after both good and evil in that book. He saw no
incongruity in dispensing homemade whisky and helping on a protracted
meeting at the call of his circuit rider. As to his politics, he
followed leaders only as he respected them, and was always a thorn
in the flesh of the political trickster. If the master of slaves was
an aspirant for office, and was possessor of both manhood and money,
the cracker white easily became his supporter. Usually holding the
balance of power, he taught many a sharp lesson to unworthy men who
sought his political favor. Generally the poor white was hostile to
slavery; yet singularly enough, true to the patriotism and loyalty
strangely formed in him for centuries in his isolated condition,
when the armies of the North began their invasions of the South,
these same whites by the tens and hundreds of thousands put on the
gray, and fell into line under the generalship of the owners of
plantation and slave. If there was ever such a proverb current among
them as “the rich man’s war, but the poor man’s fight,” I did not
hear it from the lips of the brave fellows from the log cabins who
became the famous fighters of the Confederacy. Over their lowly and
sometimes lonely and unkept graves I would lovingly inscribe that
exquisitely pathetic epitaph which one may read upon a Confederate
monument in South Carolina, dedicated especially to the men who had
nothing to fight for or die for but patriotism and honor:
[Illustration: SAM DAVIS.]
This monument perpetuates the memory of those who, true to the
instincts of their birth, faithful to the teaching of their
fathers, constant in their love for the State, died in the
performance of their duty; who have glorified a fallen cause
by the simple manhood of their lives, the patient endurance of
suffering, and the heroism of death; and who, in the dark hours of
imprisonment and the hopelessness of the hospital, in the short,
sharp agony of the field, found support and consolation in the
belief that at home they would not be forgotten.
Between the negro and his master there was ever in general a feeling
of mutual respect and confidence. If I could gather from the Old
South its most beautiful and quaint conceits and incidents, I would
find none so full of pathos and interest as the long-continued and
ever-deepening affection that often, indeed I might say commonly,
bound together the white master and the black slave. Neither poverty
nor ruin, nor changed conditions, nor disruption of every order,
social and political, was effectual in breaking this bond of loyalty
and love; and now, so long after the period of enfranchisement has
come, if I wanted concrete evidence of the singular beauty of the
social system of the Old South, I should summon as my witnesses those
lingering relics of the ante-bellum order—the “old massa” and the
old negro. Before the last of that era are gone I should be glad to
contribute to some such monument as that proposed by ex-Governor
Taylor—a trinity of figures to be carved from a single block of
Southern marble, consisting of the courtly old planter, high-bred and
gentle in face and manner; the plantation “uncle,” the counterpart
in ebony of the master so loyally served and imitated; and the
broad-bosomed black “mammy,” with varicolored turban, spotless apron,
and beaming face, the friend and helper of every living thing in
cabin or mansion.
I would that I had the power to put before you vividly and really the
strange and beautiful social life of the Old South. It was Arcadian
in its simplicity and well-nigh ideal in its conditions. It was a
reproduction of the palmiest days and best features of feudalism,
with little of the evil of that system. I know I am confronted by
a host of critics and maligners of the so-called “slaveocracy”
or “oligarchy” of the Old South. I have often read and heard of
its despotism and cruelty from those who did not know or did not
intend to be truthful or just. The war that swept slavery and the
slaveholder out of existence was inspired and envenomed by such
misrepresentation. “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” was a museum of barbarities
set forth as the ordinary life of the Old South, a composite of
brilliant and brutal falsehoods. I have no defense of feudalistic
subjection of the many to the few, nor am I a friend to caste. Yet I
have read history in vain and studied human progress to small account
if I have not, with others, discovered that a true development of
society, the stability of government, the conservation of the rights
of all classes, depend largely upon a social system in which one
class, few in numbers, capable and conscientious, rules the other
classes. A pure democracy is the dream of the idealist, and would be
unprofitable even in the millennium. The men who own the lands of a
country, its moneys, ships, and commerce, who maintain the traditions
of the past, and trace their blood to the beginnings of a country’s
existence—these will inevitably become the leaders and rulers of a
country. So the Old South had its aristocracy, whose leaders laughed
at the doctrine of equality as proclaimed by sentimentalists at home
and abroad.
This Old South aristocracy was of threefold structure—it was an
aristocracy of wealth, of blood, and of honor. It was not the wealth
of the shoddy aristocracy that here and there, even in the New South,
has forced itself into notice and vulgarly flaunts its acquisitions.
It came by inheritance of generations chiefly, as with the nobility
of England and France. Only in the aristocracy of the Old World could
there be found a counterpart to the luxury, the ease and grace of
inherited wealth, which characterized the ruling class of the Old
South. There were no gigantic fortunes as now, and wealth was not
increased or diminished by our latter-day methods of speculation
or prodigal and nauseating display. The ownership of a broad
plantation, stately country and city homes, of hundreds of slaves, of
accumulations of money and bonds, passed from father to children for
successive generations. Whatever cohesiveness the law could afford
bound such great estates together, so that prodigality or change
could least affect them. Here and there mansions of the old order of
Southern aristocracy are standing in picturesque and melancholy ruin,
as reminders of the splendor and luxury of the ante-bellum planter.
A few months ago I looked upon the partly dismantled columns of a
once noble home of the Old South, about which there clustered thickly
the memories of a great name and family which for generations had
received the homage of the South. As a child I had seen the spacious
mansion in the day of its pride, as the Mecca of political leaders
who came to counsel with its princely owner, or as the center of a
hospitality that never intermitted until the end of wealth came with
the desolations of war. The glass of fashion and the mold of form
made it famous as a social magnet. In those old days, its beautifully
kept lawns, its ample shrubbery, its primeval park of giant oaks,
its bewildering garden of flowers, its great orchards, its long rows
of whitewashed negro cabins, its stables and flashing equipages and
blooded horses and dogs, the army of darkies in its fields, the
native melody of their songs rising and falling in the distance,
the grinding of cane or ginning of cotton, the soft-shod corps of
trained servants about the mansion, the mingling of bright colors of
innumerable visitors, the brilliancy of cut glass and silver, the
lavishness of everything that could tempt the eye or palate—was like
a picture from the scenes of Old-World splendor rather than of a
young Western republic. As I looked and brooded over this ruin of a
long-famous home, its glory all gone, its light and laughter dim and
silent, I paid tribute to an aristocracy of wealth, pleasure-loving
indeed, with the inherent weaknesses of transmitted estate, but one
which, having freely received, freely gave of its abundance in a
hospitality eclipsing any people whom the world has known.
Porte Crayon, in _Harper’s Magazine_ long before the war, and Thomas
Nelson Page, in these later days, have essayed by pencil and pen to
set forth the charm of that wonderful hospitality and home life of
the Old South. I saw the last of it. With my parole in my pocket,
returning homeward through Virginia with other Confederates, hungry
and foot-sore, we turned aside from our army-beaten road to a
spacious plantation mansion on the crest of a hill, under whose porch
sat a lonely old man, the one living creature we could discern. When
we asked for bread, he excused himself for a moment on the plea that
family and servants were gone, and that he must do our bidding. In
a little while he returned with a huge platter of bread and meat,
apologizing for a menu so little varied. When we had eaten as only
Confederate soldiers could eat and were filled, we took pieces of
money from our little store and tendered him in pay. I can never
forget the big tears that welled up in the eyes of the old-time
Virginian and the flush on his cheeks, as he said: “No, boys; it is
the last morsel of food that the enemy has left me. There is not a
living creature or an atom of food remaining, but there is not money
enough in both armies to tempt my poverty. I’ve kept it up as long as
I had it to give.”
[Illustration: CONFEDERATE WHITE HOUSE.]
Down under all this wealth of fertile field and dusky laborer and
palatial home, there was something in which the old-time Southerner
took a pride beyond that which he felt in material wealth. His
aristocracy of wealth was as nothing compared to his aristocracy of
blood. An old family name that had held its place in the social and
political annals of his State for generations was a heritage vastly
dearer to him than wealth. Back to the gentle-blooded Cavaliers who
came to found this Western world, he delighted to trace his ancestry.
There could be no higher honor to him than to link his name with the
men who had planted the tree of liberty and made possible a great
republic. Whatever honors his forbears had won in field or forum,
whatever positions of public importance they had graced, he had at
his fingers’ ends, and never grew weary of rehearsing. I have nothing
but tenderness for this old-time weakness of the Southerner, if
weakness it can be called. To glory in one’s blood for centuries
past, if only kept pure, to take pride in the linking of one’s name
and fame with the history of one’s country, to grow gentler and
truer and more self-respecting because of the virtues of a long line
of ancestors who have lifted a family name to deserved eminence,
has to the writer seemed a noble sentiment. I know how fools have
made mock of it, and how silly people in the South have sometimes
brought it into contempt; but I set forth in pride and gratitude
for the Old South as one of its distinguishing characteristics this
devotion to the memory and traditions of its ancestry. If here and
there the course of transmitted blood lapsed into habit or deed of
shame, it happened so rarely that it set the bolder in contrast the
aristocracy of gentle blood. “Blood will tell.” I remember as a boy
watching admiringly and yet a little enviously the graceful and
sometimes reckless military evolutions of a hundred or more young
bloods, who were making holiday of the art of war. Trim, natty,
elegant youngsters they were, in scarlet and gold, the scions of
great families. I can remember wondering, as I watched them, if the
same dash and brilliancy that marked them as gala day soldiery would
be maintained by them in the storm of battle which was making ready
to break upon us. I had my answer. One day in Virginia the fortunes
of war threw my regiment at elbows with theirs. Glitter and gold and
scarlet were all bedimmed; but the gay laugh, the Cavalier dash, the
courage that never quailed, were with them still as they swung into a
desperate charge, singing one of their old cadet songs as lightly as
a mocking bird’s trill.
If any one should seek for the secret of that singular bravery, that
supreme contempt of pain and privation and indifference to death
that distinguished our Southern soldiery and won the admiration of
its enemies, I think it will be found largely in the ambition of the
younger generation to walk worthily after the steps of their fathers.
Homogeneous in its citizenship, changing its customs little with
passing years, slow to imbibe the spirit of other countries and of
other sections of our own country, constant to its own ideals, and
always a law unto itself, in no country on the face of the earth was
a good name and family distinction more prized and potent than in
the Old South.
Linked indissolubly with this aristocracy of wealth and of blood
was one which, in my judgment, was stronger than either, and which
extended beyond the lines of those who were born to the purple of
wealth or the pride of a great name. I do not know better how to
denominate it than this—the aristocracy of honor. Proud of their
great homes and positions of leadership, and boastful of their high
descent, the aristocrats of the Old South, true to the Cavalier
traditions, erected an ethical system that defined and regulated
personal and public matters and became the inflexible code of every
Southern gentleman. Its foundation was laid in a man’s “honor,” and
the honor of a gentleman was the supreme test and standard of every
relation, public and private. The extremes of this old Southern
ethical code were illustrated, on the one part, by the maxim that
“a man’s word is his bond,” which meant that, the word of honor
once passed between men, it must be as inviolable as life itself.
Practically, it came to mean, as the present generation little knows
or appreciates, that ninetenths of the business of the Old South
was a mere promise to pay, and that its millions rested from year to
year upon the faith and honor that underlay its vast credit system. A
gentleman of the Old South might be guilty of not a few peccadillos.
He might sin easily and often against himself, but woe to the man who
sinned against other men by withholding what was due and had been
promised “on honor.” Personally I have known men of large business
affairs whose whole fortunes depended on the passing of a word, and
who on the instant would have surrendered their last dollar to make
good that “word of honor.” Nor was this exceptional. It was bred in
the bone and flesh of every old-time Southern boy that upon this word
of personal faith the gentleman must take his stand, and at whatever
cost of comfort or convenience or self-denial or sacrifice, even to
the death, he must make it good. Such was the code of honor upon its
business side.
There was another illustration of the code of a more somber kind,
now many years obsolete. It was by the crack of pistol and flash
of sword that in the old time not infrequently were determined the
fine points of honor. Long ago this “code duello,” with its Hotspur
partisans, passed away, and I thank God for the gentler spirit that
has come in its stead. With all of its blood and brutality, however,
it had one merit which I am frank to allow it. It compelled one to
circumspection in what he said and did, or it made him pay instant
price for his wrongdoing. It differentiated the man of courage from
the bully and the sneak, and it set in bold relief the marks of the
gentleman. I am glad to say, too, that during the long and evil reign
of the code duello satisfaction in money and by damage suits at law
was not as popular as now. The Kentuckian whose bloody face provoked
the inquiry, “What ails you?” answered by the code and card when he
replied, “I called a gentleman a liar.” The kind of gentleman who
would salve the wounded honor of his person or family by a check was
unknown or unrecognized before the war.
If one wishes to see the old-time planter at his best, he will find
him as the pencils of Page, Harris, and Hopkinson Smith have drawn
him—courtly, genial, warm-hearted, gracious, proud of his family,
boastful of his ancestral line, a lover of gun and dog and horse and
mint julep, an incomparable mixer in the society of well-bred ladies
and gentlemen, as unique and distinguished a figure as ever graced
the ball or banquet room, the political forum, or the field of honor.
His race will soon be extinct, and only the kindly voice and pen of
those who knew him and loved him in spite of his weaknesses will
truly perpetuate his memory. For two hundred years and more his was
the conspicuous and unrivaled figure upon the social and political
stage of our history. The good that he did lives after him; may the
evil be interred with his bones!
Side by side with the aristocrat, waiting deferentially to do his
bidding, with a grace and courtliness hardly surpassed by his master,
I place the negro servant of the Old South. If one figure was unique,
the other is not less so. Either figure in the passing throng would
quickly arrest your attention. I am frank to confess to a tender
feeling for those faithful black servitors of the Old South—the
“Uncle Remuses” and “Aunt Chloes” of picture and poetry. On the
great plantations, in their picturesque colors, in constant laughter
and good nature, well fed and clothed and generally well-kept
and moderately worked, the negro of slavery lived his careless,
heart-free life. The specter of hunger and want never disquieted him.
His cabin, clothing, food, garden, pocket money, and holidays came
without his concern. I think I state the truth when I say that for
the millions of slaves of the Old South there were fewer heartaches
than ever troubled a race of people. Freedom may be an inestimable
boon. I know that poet and orator have so declared. But when I look
upon the care-worn faces of the remnant of old-time negroes who have
been testing freedom for a generation and have found it full of
heartache and worry, I take exception to the much-vaunted doctrine of
liberty as the panacea for all human ills. An old darky, with white
head and shuffling feet and haunted look in his eyes, stopped the
other day at the door of my office, and, after the manner of the old
days, his cap in hand, asked “if massa could give the old nigger a
dime?” Something in my voice or manner must have intimated to him
that, like him, I belonged to the old order, as he said: “It’s all
right for some folks, dis thing they calls freedom; but God knows
I’d be glad to see the old days once more before I die.” Freedom to
him, and to others like him, had proven a cheat and a snare. I have
no word of apology or defense for slavery. Long ago I thanked God
that it was no longer lawful for one human being to hold another in
enforced servitude. But a generation or more of free negroes has been
our most familiar object-lesson, and the outcome is painful at best.
The negro who commands respect in the South to-day, as a rule, is the
negro who was born and trained under slavery. The new generation,
those who have known nothing but freedom, it is charity to say,
are an unsatisfactory body of people generally. Whenever you find
a negro whose education comes not from books and college only, but
from the example and home teaching and training of his white master
and mistress, you will generally find one who speaks the truth, is
honest, self-respecting and self-restraining, docile and reverent,
and always the friend of the Southern white gentleman and lady.
Here and there in the homes of the New South these graduates from
the school of slavery are to be found in the service of old families
and their descendants, and the relationship is one of peculiar
confidence and affection; and this old-time darky, wherever you find
him in his integrity, pride, and industry, is in bold contrast with
the post-bellum negro, despite his educational opportunity. Living
as I do in a city famed for its negro schools, I have tried to
observe fairly, and indeed with strong predilection in their favor,
the processes and results of negro education. Son of an abolitionist
of the Henry Clay school, I have sincerely wanted to see the negro
succeed educationally and take his place with other men in skill and
service. If any city of the South should be the first to confirm the
negro’s fitness for an education and his increase in value and in
character as the subject of it, I thought it but fair to expect it
of a city famous for its colored universities. But, with honorable
exceptions to the rule, the negro of post-bellum birth and education
in this city is usually a thorn in the flesh to one who seeks or uses
his service, no matter what that service may be. “We don’t have to
work any more,” said one recently; “we are getting educated.” Yet
when one of the darky patriarchs of the Old South died the other day,
a leading daily paper, in a tender and beautiful editorial, noted how
this colored gentleman of the old school, after a long life of honor
and trust, with hundreds of thousands of dollars passing through his
hands as confidential messenger, had won the respect of all men by
the sheer nobility of his life.
[Illustration: CONFEDERATE MONUMENT.]
Perhaps the education of hand and foot and eye—the manual training
schemes of Booker Washington and other like negro educators—may
suffice to avert the degeneracy of the younger negro race. The
trouble, however, is that many of these are not enamored of hard
work and constant labor. They turn their backs upon ax and saw and
plow which the white man offers them along with ample wages, and
prefer the negro barroom and the crap table. After forty years have
gone, and millions of money have been expended by both Northern and
Southern whites in an effort to educate and train him for profitable
service, the negro is found practically in two classes—the larger
class massed in the cities and towns, too often despising and
shirking work except as compelled to it by sheer necessity; the other
class consisting of those who are not ashamed of any kind of work in
field, factory, or shop, the significant thing being that those who
want work and are doing it are commonly the negroes with little or
no education, while those who are shunning work are usually of the
so-called educated class.
I am not surprised at the failure of the negro’s secular education
to make him a good and profitable citizen. It is only another
illustration of the folly of trying to sharpen the intellect and
leave untrained the heart and conscience. The Old South, by contact,
example, and precept, put a conscience and a sense of right and
honorable living into its slaves. The New South is largely filling
them with books. The negro of the Old South was religious, genuinely
so, though by reason of his emotional nature his religion was often
a matter of feeling. But such religion as he had he got from white
teachers and preachers, and it was real and scriptural. It bound
him to tell the truth, to lie not, to be sober and honest, and to
do no man wrong. How well the negro learned and practiced this
old-fashioned religion of slavery, let two facts attest. First, few
negroes thus trained in the Old South, so far as the speaker knows,
have suffered by rope or fagot for the unnamable crime that so often
has marked the negro of the New South. If there be exceptions to this
rule, certainly they are exceedingly rare. Secondly, at a time when
every white man and even white boys were at the front fighting the
battles of the Confederacy, the wives and mothers and children of the
soldiers were cared for loyally and devotedly by the negro slaves
to an extent unmatched in the history of the world. Such was the
honor and conscience of the negro slaves that they watched over the
helpless women and children of those who were engaged in a conflict
involving their own slavery.
What the negro needs more than books and college curriculum is a
conscience. He needs religion of the genuine, transforming kind that
will stop his petty thieving, his street corner loafing, and his
tendencies toward the barbarism from which in the Old South religion
wrested his fathers. I think the time has come when our Southern
white churches should turn again toward the negro and help him as far
as possible to a knowledge of pure and undefiled religion, after the
example of such ministry as that of Capers and Andrew to the slaves.
If I find any fault with ourselves in our relationships with the
negro, it is that we too easily conceded that the negro’s moral and
religious interests should be taken out of our hands since the war
by sentimentalists, or by those whose labors among the negroes were
inspired by political rather than by genuinely benevolent motives.
Once politics is no longer an ally to the negro, and White House
favors are not permitted to turn his head, I have some hope that the
Southern white and the negro may come together in peace and mutual
affection under the power of the gospel of Jesus Christ, and after an
alienation of more than a generation may take up again the old order
of religious instruction and training, which the white fathers of
the Old South were so zealous to give and which the black servants
were so eager to receive. When a young pastor came to me a few weeks
ago asking an opinion upon the fact that, in response to a request
from a score or more of families of negroes on his charge who were
without church and other religious facilities, he and his wife had
formed their children into a Sunday school and the teachers of his
white school were giving them faithful and intelligent instruction
every Sabbath, I saw in the incident an intimation of what the New
South must do if it would restore the lost negro conscience of the
Old South.
I cannot dismiss this passing glance at the social life of the Old
South without a sense of abiding regret that it is gone forever.
My last personal contact with it was the Christmas just preceding
the war. Though the air was thick with rumors of impending strife,
no gun as yet had broken the quiet of a land so full of peace and
prosperity. I think the merriment of those last holidays of ’61 was
greater than ever before. I recall it all the more vividly because
it was the last old-fashioned Christmas that came to my boyhood, as
it was the last that came to the Old South. For weeks preceding it
everything on the old plantation was full of stir and preparation.
Holly and mistletoe and cedar were being put about the rooms of the
big house to welcome home the boys and girls from school. Secret
councils were being held as to the Christmas gifts that were to be
given religiously to every one, white and black. The back yard was
piled up with loads of oak and hickory to make bright and warm the
Christmas nights. The negro seamstresses were busy making new suits
and dresses for all the servants. The master of the plantation was
figuring up the accounts of the year and making ready for generous
drafts upon his ready money. There was an increasing rustle of
excitement and happiness that ran from the gray-haired grandfather
and mother down to the smallest pickaninny in the remotest negro
cabin. The peace and goodness of God seemed to brood over it all.
The stately plantation home, with its lofty white columns, its big
rooms, its great fireplaces, opened wide to all sons and daughters
and grandchildren, uncles and aunts, nephews and nieces. We poured
into it; and if ever heaven came close to earth and mingled with it,
I think it was that Christmas Eve when the last wanderer and exile
had come and the grace was said at the great table by a gray-haired
patriarch of the Old South. There was little sleep for small boys
and girls, and long before daylight of Christmas shone in upon us
we were scurrying from room to room crying, “Christmas gift!” to
which, whenever first spoken by child or dependent, there could be
but the one gracious response. Out on the back porches the negroes
were waiting in grinning rows to follow our example, and many were
the dusky faces that beamed with delight over their never-failing
Christmas remembrances. Down in the cabins and up in the big halls of
the mansion the lights and fires burned the entire week, and there
was nothing that could eat that was not surfeited with the world of
eatables made ready. I must beg pardon of the W. C. T. U., which had
not then begun its beneficent prohibitory career, if I recall the big
flowing bowl of eggnog, renewed daily and served generously to all. I
know that this old-time Christmas beverage is growing into disrepute,
for which I am sincerely glad, but I confess to a sort of carnal
delight of memory when I recall how good it tasted to the average
small boy on an early Christmas morning.
[Illustration: JEFFERSON DAVIS.]
The Old South intellectually was a fitting complement to its unique
social system. The charge has often been made against it that it
produced few if any great writers and left no lasting impress upon
the literature of the times. If this were true, it could be answered
that the Old South was true to its distinctive mission. It needed to
produce great thinkers, and it produced them, as the half-century
of its dominating leadership attests. An Elizabethan age, with
its coterie of great writers, comes to any nation only at long
intervals, and under conditions which are of providential rather
than of human ordering. The Southern man, by tradition, inheritance,
and choice, and by virtue of a certain philosophic temper which
seemed to inhere in his race, was trained to think and to speak
clearly, and especially upon grave matters of public import. He was
a born politician in the best sense of that much-abused term. Like
Hannibal, he was led early in life to the altars of his country and
dedicated to its service. He coveted the power and the authority of
the rostrum rather than the pen. In the beauty of field and forest,
of bright stream and blossoming flower, of song and sunshine, or in
the historic incidents of the Old South, he had ample inspiration
and material for his pen, if he had cared to use it. But it was ever
his ambition and delight to stand before his countrymen on some
great public day, and set forth the length and breadth of some great
argument, patiently studied and thought out in his library and now
made luminous and inspiring to the listening multitude. If it were
true that the South had no great writers, I could even content myself
by recalling how, when one of its brilliant thinkers and orators cast
his spell upon the culture of old Boston, the finest editorial writer
of that city of writers placed over his leading editorial the next
morning the question, “What could be finer?”
While it was true of the Old South that members of its learned
professions commonly dallied with the Muses, there was no distinctive
profession of letters. The professional poet, historian, and maker of
fiction, and publisher and seller of books, were scarcely known. A
rural people, a relatively sparse population of readers, the absence
of great cities, the concentration of thought and learning upon
politics and plans of government, the entire lack of commercialism
as a motive to literary production, were reasons why the Old South
contributed comparatively little _per se_ to the stock of permanent
literature. There was another hindrance in the fact, which I do not
like to recall, that the South, in mistaken largeness of heart or
short-sightedness of vision, fell upon two ways that lowered its own
self-respect and dwarfed the good it might have attained. It set up a
fashion, on the one hand, of reading and patronizing alien books, and
accounted these foreign literary products as better than its own. And
along with this same mistaken fondness for foreign literary wares, it
began to slight its own struggling colleges and schools, and to send
its sons and daughters elsewhere for a culture not superior to that
procurable at its own doors.
Yet with such admitted weaknesses, let no one suppose for an
instant that the ability to write or think or speak worthy of the
finest culture was in any wise wanting to the gentleman of the Old
South. Enter his library, and you would find what is becoming rare
in the New South, but which was the mark of the gentleman of the
Old South—the finest and completest array of costly books upon
all subjects, ranging through science, art, literature, theology,
biography, history, and politics. Nothing that money could buy or
trained scholarship select was omitted. A man’s books were his
most intimate friends and comrades, and such was the wide range
and patient study of the average gentleman of the Old South that
wits and savants vied in paying tribute to his varied and scholarly
attainments. In singular contrast, the other day one of our literary
leaders, discussing the scanty sale of really valuable books,
bemoaned the fact that the Southern gentleman’s library is fast
becoming extinct.