not the fault of the colored people. Their fealty to the North and the
Republican party is without parallel in the world's history. In
Louisiana alone more than five thousand lives attest it. While in nearly
every other Southern State fully as many lie in premature graves,
martyrs to the cause. Considering themselves abandoned and left to the
choice of extermination or the relinquishment of the exercise of their
political rights, they have, in large districts in the South, wisely
preferred the latter. Kept in a constant condition of suspense and dread
by the peculiar methods of conducting canvasses and elections in that
section, who can blame them? It is my firm conviction that no other
people under God's sun, similarly situated, would have done half so
well. The fault is attributable to the vicious practise, which obtains
largely even here in the civilized North, of apologizing for and
condoning crimes committed for political purposes. Men love power
everywhere and Southern Democrats are no exception. On the contrary,
deeming themselves "born to command," as I have already remarked, and
knowing that there is no power to restrain or punish them for crimes
committed upon the poor and defenseless colored citizens, of course they
have pushed them to the wall. The inequality between the two races in
all that constitutes protective forces was such as to render that result
inevitable as soon as Federal protection was withdrawn, and I do not
hesitate to affirm that unless some means are devised to enforce respect
for the rights of the colored citizens of the South, their
enfranchisement will prove a curse instead of a benefit to the country.
Emancipated to cripple the South and enfranchised to strengthen the
North, the colored race was freed and its people made citizens in the
interest of the Republic. Its fundamental law declares them citizens,
and the Fifteenth Amendment expressly states that: "The right of
citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged
by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or
previous condition of servitude." The faith and honor of the Nation are
pledged to the rigid enforcement of the law in this, as in every other
respect, and the interests of the 40,000,000 white people in the
Republic demand it. If the law, both constitutional and statutory,
affecting the rights and privileges of the colored citizens can be
defiantly ignored and disobeyed in eleven States of the Union in a
matter of such grave import as this--a matter involving the very essence
of republican government, _i. e._, the right of the majority to
rule--who can tell where it will end and how long it will be before
elections in all of the States will be armed conflicts, to be decided by
the greatest prowess and dexterity in the use of the bowie knife,
pistol, shot-gun and rifle?
White men of the North, I tell you this practise of controlling
elections in the South by force and fraud is contagious! It spreads with
alarming rapidity and unless eradicated, will overtake and overwhelm you
as it has your friends in the South. It showed its horrid head in Maine,
and came very near wresting that State from a lawful majority. Employed
in the South first to drive Republicans from a few counties, it has
grown from "autumnal outbreaks" into an almost perpetual hurricane and,
gathering force as it goes, has violently seized State after State,
mastered the entire South, and is even now thundering at the gates of
the national Capital. Whether it shall capture it too, and spread its
blighting influence all over the land, is the question _you_ must
answer at the poles in this election.
It was the intention of the great men who founded this Republic that it
should be "A government of the people, for the people, and by the
people"; that its citizens, from the highest to the lowest, should enjoy
perfect equality before the law. To realize this idea the rule of the
majority, to be ascertained through the processes provided by law, was
wisely adopted, and the laws providing for and regulating elections are
respected and obeyed in the Northern, Eastern, and Western States. The
Democracy of the South alone seems privileged to set at defiance the
organic as well as every statutory enactment, national and State,
designed to secure this essential principle of free government. Those
men must be taught that such an exceptional and unhealthy condition of
things will not be tolerated; that the rights of citizens of every
nationality are sacred in the eyes of the law, and their right to vote
for whom they please and have their ballots honestly counted shall not
be denied or abridged with impunity; that the faith of the Nation is
pledged to the defense and maintenance of these obligations, and it will
keep its pledge at whatever cost may be found necessary.
THE BLACK WOMAN OF THE SOUTH: HER NEGLECTS AND HER NEEDS[18]
BY ALEXANDER CRUMMELL, D. D., LL. D.
ALEXANDER CRUMMELL, D.D., _an eminent Negro Episcopal clergyman; a
graduate of Oxford University, England; professor in a Liberian College;
rector of St. Luke's in Washington and founder of the Negro Academy._
[Note 18: Address before the "Freedman's Aid Society," Methodist
Episcopal Church, Ocean Grove, N. J., August 15th, 1883.]
It is an age clamorous everywhere for the dignities, the grand
prerogatives, and the glory of woman. There is not a country in Europe
where she has not risen somewhat above the degradation of centuries, and
pleaded successfully for a new position and a higher vocation. As the
result of this new reformation we see her, in our day, seated in the
lecture-rooms of ancient universities, rivaling her brothers in the
fields of literature, the grand creators of ethereal art, the
participants in noble civil franchises, the moving spirit in grand
reformations, and the guide, agent, or assistant in all the noblest
movements for the civilization and regeneration of man.
In these several lines of progress the American woman has run on in
advance of her sisters in every other quarter of the globe. The
advantage, she has received, the rights and prerogatives she has secured
for herself, are unequaled by any other class of women in the world. It
will not be thought amiss, then, that I come here to-day to present to
your consideration the one grand exception to this general superiority
of women, viz., _The black woman of the South_.
* * * * *
The rural or plantation population of the South was made up almost
entirely of people of pure Negro blood. And this brings out also the
other disastrous fact, namely, that this large black population has been
living from the time of their introduction into America, a period of
more than two hundred years, in a state of unlettered rudeness. The
Negro all this time has been an intellectual starveling. This has been
more especially the condition of the black woman of the South. Now and
then a black man has risen above the debased condition of his people.
Various causes would contribute to the advantage of the _men_: the
relation of servants to superior masters; attendance at courts with
them; their presence at political meetings; listening to table-talk
behind their chairs; traveling as valets; the privilege of books and
reading in great houses, and with indulgent masters--all these served to
lift up a black _man_ here and there to something like superiority. But
no such fortune fell to the lot of the plantation woman. The black woman
of the South was left perpetually in a state of hereditary darkness and
rudeness.
* * * * *
In her girlhood all the delicate tenderness of her sex was rudely
outraged. In the field, in the rude cabin, in the press-room, in the
factory, she was thrown into the companionship of coarse and ignorant
men. No chance was given her for delicate reserve or tender modesty.
From her girlhood she was the doomed victim of the grossest passions.
All the virtues of her sex were utterly ignored. If the instinct of
chastity asserted itself, then she had to fight like a tigress for the
ownership and possession of her own person; and, ofttimes, had to suffer
pains and lacerations for her virtuous self-assertion. When she reached
maturity all the tender instincts of her womanhood were ruthlessly
violated. At the age of marriage--always prematurely anticipated under
slavery--she was mated, as the stock of the plantation were mated, _not_
to be the companion of a loved and chosen husband, but to be the breeder
of human cattle, for the field or the auction-block. With that mate she
went out, morning after morning to toil, as a common field-hand. As it
was _his_, so likewise was it her lot to wield the heavy hoe, or to
follow the plow, or to gather in the crops. She was a "hewer of wood and
a drawer of water." She was a common field-hand. She had to keep her
place in the gang from morn till eve, under the burden of a heavy task,
or under the stimulus or the fear of a cruel lash. She was a picker of
cotton. She labored at the sugar-mill and in the tobacco-factory. When,
through weariness or sickness, she has fallen behind her allotted task,
there came, as punishment, the fearful stripes upon her shrinking,
lacerated flesh.
Her home life was of the most degrading nature. She lived in the rudest
huts, and partook of the coarsest food, and dressed in the scantiest
garb, and slept, in multitudinous cabins, upon the hardest boards.
Thus she continued a beast of burden down to the period of those
maternal anxieties which, in ordinary civilized life, give repose,
quiet, and care to expectant mothers. But, under the slave system, few
such relaxations were allowed. And so it came to pass that little
children were ushered into this world under conditions which many
cattle-raisers would not suffer for their flocks or herds. Thus she
became the mother of children. But even then there was for her no
suretyship of motherhood, or training, or control. Her own offspring
were _not_ her own. She and husband and children were all the property
of others. All these sacred ties were constantly snapped and cruelly
sundered. _This_ year she had one husband; and next year, through some
auction sale, she might be separated from him and mated to another.
There was no sanctity of family, no binding tie of marriage, none of the
fine felicities and the endearing affections of home. None of these
things was the lot of Southern black women. Instead thereof, a gross
barbarism which tended to blunt the tender sensibilities, to obliterate
feminine delicacy and womanly shame, came down as her heritage from
generation to generation; and it seems a miracle of providence and grace
that, notwithstanding these terrible circumstances, so much struggling
virtue lingered amid these rude cabins, that so much womanly worth and
sweetness abided in their bosoms, as slave-holders themselves have borne
witness to.
But some of you will ask: "Why bring up these sad memories of the past?
Why distress us with these dead and departed cruelties?" Alas, my
friends, these are not dead things. Remember that
"The evil that men do lives after them."
The evil of gross and monstrous abominations, the evil of great organic
institutions crop out long after the departure of the institutions
themselves. If you go to Europe you will find not only the roots, but
likewise many of the deadly fruits of the old Feudal system still
surviving in several of its old states and kingdoms. So, too, with
slavery. The eighteen years of freedom have not obliterated all its
deadly marks from either the souls or bodies of the black woman. The
conditions of life, indeed, have been modified since emancipation; but
it still maintains that the black woman is the Pariah woman of this
land! We have, indeed, degraded women, immigrants, from foreign lands.
In their own countries some of them were so low in the social scale that
they were yoked with the cattle to plow the fields. They were rude,
unlettered, coarse, and benighted. But when they reach _this_ land there
comes an end to their degraded condition.
"They touch our country and their shackles fall."
As soon as they become grafted into the stock of American life they
partake at once of all its large gifts and its noble resources.
Not so with the black woman of the South. Freed, legally she has been;
but the act of emancipation had no talismanic influence to reach to and
alter and transform her degrading social life.
When that proclamation was issued she might have heard the whispered
words in her every hut, "Open, Sesame;" but, so far as her humble
domicile and her degraded person were concerned, there was no invisible
but gracious Genii who, on the instant, could transmute the rudeness of
her hut into instant elegance, and change the crude surroundings of her
home into neatness, taste, and beauty.
The truth is, "Emancipation Day" found her a prostrate and degraded
being; and, although it has brought numerous advantages to her sons, it
has produced but the simplest changes in her social and domestic
condition. She is still the crude, rude, ignorant mother. Remote from
cities, the dweller still in the old plantation hut, neighboring to the
sulky, disaffected master class, who still think her freedom was a
personal robbery of themselves, none of the "fair humanities" have
visited her humble home. The light of knowledge has not fallen upon her
eyes. The fine domesticities which give the charm to family life, and
which, by the refinement and delicacy of womanhood, preserve the
civilization of nations, have not come to _her_. She has still the rude,
coarse labor of men. With her rude husband she still shares the hard
service of a field-hand. Her house, which shelters, perhaps, some six or
eight children, embraces but two rooms. Her furniture is of the rudest
kind. The clothing of the household is scant and of the coarsest
material, has ofttimes the garniture of rags; and for herself and
offspring is marked, not seldom, by the absence of both hats and shoes.
She has rarely been taught to sew, and the field labor of slavery times
has kept her ignorant of the habitudes of neatness, and the requirements
of order. Indeed, coarse food, coarse clothes, coarse living, coarse
manners, coarse companions, coarse surroundings, coarse neighbors, both
black and white, yea, every thing coarse, down to the coarse, ignorant,
senseless religion, which excites her sensibilities and starts her
passions, go to make up the life of the masses of black women in the
hamlets and villages of the rural South.
This is the state of black womanhood. Take the girlhood of this same
region, and it presents the same aspect, save that in large districts
the white man has not forgotten the olden times of slavery and with
indeed the deepest sentimental abhorrence of "amalgamation," still
thinks that the black girl is to be perpetually the victim of his lust!
In the larger towns and in cities our girls in common schools and
academies are receiving superior culture. Of the 15,000 colored school
teachers in the South, more than half are colored young women, educated
since emancipation. But even these girls, as well as their more ignorant
sisters in rude huts, are followed and tempted and insulted by the
ruffianly element of Southern society, who think that black _men_ have
no rights which white men should regard, and black _women_ no virtue
which white men should respect!
And now look at the _vastness_ of this degradation. If I had been
speaking of the population of a city, or a town, or even a village, the
tale would be a sad and melancholy one. But I have brought before you
the condition of millions of women. According to the census of 1880
there were, in the Southern States, 3,327,678 females of all ages of the
African race. Of these there were 674,365 girls between twelve and
twenty, 1,522,696 between twenty and eighty. "These figures," remarks an
observing friend of mine, "are startling!" And when you think that the
masses of these women live in the rural districts; that they grow up in
rudeness and ignorance; that their former masters are using few means to
break up their hereditary degradation, you can easily take in the
pitiful condition of this population, and forecast the inevitable future
to multitudes of females unless a mighty special effort is made for the
improvement of the black womanhood of the South.
I know the practical nature of the American mind, I know how the
question of values intrudes itself into even the domain of philanthropy;
and, hence, I shall not be astonished if the query suggests itself,
whether special interest in the black woman will bring any special
advantage to the American nation.
Let me dwell for a few moments upon this phase of the subject. Possibly
the view I am about suggesting has never before been presented to the
American mind. But, Negro as I am, I shall make no apology for venturing
the claim that the Negress is one of the most interesting of all the
classes of women on the globe. I am speaking of her, not as a perverted
and degraded creature, but in her natural state, with her native
instincts and peculiarities.
Let me repeat just here the words of a wise, observing, tender-hearted
philanthropist, whose name and worth and words have attained celebrity.
It is fully forty years ago since the celebrated Dr. Channing said: "We
are holding in bondage one of the best races of the human family. The
Negro is among the mildest, gentlest of men. He is singularly
susceptible of improvement from abroad.... His nature is affectionate,
easily touched, and hence he is more open to religious improvement than
the white man.... The African carries with him much more than _we_ the
genius of a meek, long-suffering, loving virtue."
I should feel ashamed to allow these words to fall from my lips if it
were not necessary to the lustration of the character of my black
sisters of the South. I do not stand here to-day to plead for the black
_man_. He is a man; and if he is weak he must go the wall. He is a man;
he must fight his own way, and if he is strong in mind and body, he can
take care of himself. But for the mothers, sisters, and daughters of my
race I have a right to speak. And when I think of their sad condition
down South; think, too, that since the day of emancipation hardly any
one has lifted up a voice in their behalf, I feel it a duty and a
privilege to set forth their praises and to extol their excellencies.
For, humble and benighted as she is, the black woman of the South is one
of the queens of womanhood. If there is any other woman on this earth
who in native aboriginal qualities is her superior, I know not where she
is to be found; for, I do say, that in tenderness of feeling, in genuine
native modesty, in large disinterestedness, in sweetness of disposition
and deep humility, in unselfish devotedness, and in warm, motherly
assiduities, the Negro woman is unsurpassed by any other woman on this
earth.
The testimony to this effect is almost universal--our enemies themselves
being witnesses. You know how widely and how continuously, for
generations, the Negro has been traduced, ridiculed, derided. Some of
you may remember the journals and the hostile criticisms of Coleridge
and Trollope and Burton, West Indian and African travelers. Very many of
you may remember the philosophical disquisitions of the ethnological
school of 1847, the contemptuous dissertations of Hunt and Gliddon. But
it is worthy of notice in all these cases that the sneer, the contempt,
the bitter gibe, have been invariably leveled against the black
_man_--never against the black woman! On the contrary, _she_ has almost
everywhere been extolled and eulogized. The black man was called a
stupid, thick-lipped, flat-nosed, long-heeled, empty-headed animal; the
link between the baboon and the human being, only fit to be a slave! But
everywhere, even in the domains of slavery, how tenderly has the Negress
been spoken of! She has been the nurse of childhood. To her all the
cares and heart-griefs of youth have been intrusted. Thousands and tens
of thousands in the West Indies and in our Southern States have risen up
and told the tale of her tenderness, of her gentleness, patience, and
affection. No other woman in the world has ever had such tributes to a
high moral nature, sweet, gentle love, and unchanged devotedness. And by
the memory of my own mother and dearest sisters I can declare it to be
true!
Hear the tribute of Michelet: "The Negress, of all others, is the most
loving, the most generating; and this, not only because of her youthful
blood, but we must also admit, for the richness of her heart. She is
loving among the loving, good among the good. (Ask the travelers whom
she has so often saved.) Goodness is creative; it is fruitfulness; it is
the very benediction of a holy act. The fact that woman is so fruitful I
attribute to her treasures of tenderness, to that ocean of goodness
which permeates her heart.... Africa is a woman. Her races are
feminine.... In many of the black tribes of Central Africa the women
rule, and they are as intelligent as they are amiable and kind."
The reference in Michelet to the generosity of the African woman to
travelers brings to mind the incident in Mungo Park's travels, where the
African women fed, nourished, and saved him. The men had driven him
away. They would not even allow him to feed with the cattle; and so,
faint, weary, and despairing, he went to a remote hut and lay down on
the earth to die. One woman, touched with compassion, came to him,
brought him food and milk, and at once he revived. Then he tells us of
the solace and the assiduities of these gentle creatures for his
comfort. I give you his own words: "The rites of hospitality thus
performed toward a stranger in distress, my worthy benefactress,
pointing to the mat, and telling me that I might sleep there without
apprehension, called to the female part of her family which had stood
gazing on me all the while in fixed astonishment, to resume the task of
spinning cotton, in which they continued to employ themselves a great
part of the night. They lightened their labors by songs, one of which
was composed extempore, for I was myself the subject of it. It was sung
by one of the young women, the rest joining in a sort of chime. The air
was sweet and plaintive, and the words, literally translated, were
these: 'The winds roared and the rains fell; the poor white man, faint
and weary, came and sat under our tree. He has no mother to bring him
milk, no wife to grind his corn. Let us pity the white man, no mother
has he,'" etc.
Perhaps I may be pardoned the intrusion, just here, on my own personal
experience. During a residence of nigh twenty years in West Africa, I
saw the beauty and felt the charm of the native female character. I saw
the native woman in her _heathen_ state, and was delighted to see, in
numerous tribes, that extraordinary sweetness, gentleness, docility,
modesty, and especially those maternal solicitudes which make every
African boy both gallant and defender of his mother.
I saw her in her _civilized_ state, in Sierra Leone; saw precisely the
same characteristics, but heightened, dignified, refined, and sanctified
by the training of the schools, the refinements of civilization, and the
graces of Christian sentiment and feeling. Of all the memories of
foreign travel there are none more delightful than those of the families
and the female friends of Freetown.
A French traveler speaks with great admiration of the black ladies of
Hayti. "In the towns," he says, "I met all the charms of civilized life.
The graces of the ladies of Port-au-Prince will never be effaced from my
recollections."
It was, without doubt, the instant discernment of these fine and tender
qualities which prompted the touching Sonnet of Wordsworth, written in
1802, on the occasion of the cruel exile of Negroes from France by the
French Government:
"Driven from the soil of France, a female came
From Calais with us, brilliant in array,
A Negro woman like a lady gay,
Yet downcast as a woman fearing blame;
Meek, destitute, as seemed, of hope or aim
She sat, from notice turning not away,
But on all proffered intercourse did lay
A weight of languid speech--or at the same
Was silent, motionless in eyes and face.
Meanwhile those eyes retained their tropic fire
Which burning independent of the mind,
Joined with the luster of her rich attire
To mock the outcast--O ye heavens, be kind!
And feel, thou earth, for this afflicted race!"
But I must remember that I am to speak not only of the neglects of the
black woman, but also of her needs. And the consideration of her needs
suggests the remedy which should be used for the uplifting of this woman
from a state of brutality and degradation.
* * * * *