colored college—called a college, but with a necessary preparatory
department—children and well-grown young women and men. The buildings
are fine, spacious, not inferior to the best modern educational
buildings either in architectural appearance or in interior furnishing,
with scientific apparatus, a library, the appliances approved by recent
experience in teaching, with admirable methods and discipline, and an
accomplished corps of instructors. The scholars were neat, orderly,
intelligent in appearance. As I stood for a moment or two looking at
their bright expectant faces the profound significance of the spectacle
and the situation came over me, and I said: “I wonder if you know what
you are doing, if you realize what this means. Here you are in a school
the equal of any of its grade in the land, with better methods of
instruction than prevailed anywhere when I was a boy, with the gates of
all knowledge opened as freely to you as to any youth in the land—here,
in this State, where only about twenty years ago it was a misdemeanor,
punishable with fine and imprisonment, to teach a colored person to read
and write. And I am brought here to see this fine school, as one of the
best things he can show me in the city, by a Confederate colonel. Not in
all history is there any instance of a change like this in a quarter
of a century: no, not in one nor in two hundred years. It seems
incredible.”
This is one of the schools instituted and sustained by Northern friends
of the South; but while it exhibits the capacity of the colored people
for education, it is not so significant in the view we are now taking
of the New South as the public schools. Indeed, next to the amazing
industrial change in the South, nothing is so striking as the interest
and progress in the matter of public schools. In all the cities we
visited the people were enthusiastic about their common schools. It was
a common remark, “I suppose we have one of the best school systems in
the country.” There is a wholesome rivalry to have the best. We found
everywhere the graded system and the newest methods of teaching in
vogue. In many of the primary rooms in both white and colored schools,
when I asked if these little children knew the alphabet when they came
to school, the reply was, “Not generally we prefer they should not;
we use the new method of teaching words.” In many schools the youngest
pupils were taught to read music by sight, and to understand its
notation by exercises on the blackboard. In the higher classes
generally, the instruction in arithmetic, in reading, In geography, in
history, and in literature was wholly in the modern method. In some of
the geography classes and in the language classes I was reminded of the
drill in the German schools. In all the cities, as far as I could learn,
the public money was equally distributed to the colored and to the white
schools, and the number of schools bore a just proportion to the number
of the two races. When the town was equally divided in population, the
number of pupils in the colored schools was about the same as the number
in the white schools. There was this exception: though provision was
made for a high-school to terminate the graded for both colors, the
number in the colored high-school department was usually very small;
and the reason given by colored and white teachers was that the colored
children had not yet worked up to it. The colored people prefer teachers
of their own race, and they are quite generally employed; but many of
the colored schools have white teachers, and generally, I think, with
better results, although I saw many thoroughly good colored teachers,
and one or two colored classes under them that compared favorably with
any white classes of the same grade.
The great fact, however, is that the common-school system has become
a part of Southern life, is everywhere accepted as a necessity, and
usually money is freely voted to sustain it. But practically, as an
efficient factor in civilization, the system is yet undeveloped in the
country districts. I can only speak from personal observation of the
cities, but the universal testimony was that the common schools in the
country for both whites and blacks are poor. Three months’ schooling in
the year is about the rule, and that of a slack and inferior sort, under
incompetent teachers. In some places the colored people complain that
ignorant teachers are put over them, who are chosen simply on political
considerations. More than one respectable colored man told me that he
would not send his children to such schools, but combined with a few
others to get them private instruction. The colored people are more
dependent on public schools than the whites, for while there are vast
masses of colored people in city and country who have neither the money
nor the disposition to sustain schools, in all the large places the
whites are able to have excellent private schools, and do have them.
Scarcely anywhere can the colored people as yet have a private school
without white aid from somewhere. At the present rate of progress,
and even of the increase of tax-paying ability, it must be a long time
before the ignorant masses, white and black, in the country districts,
scattered over a wide area, can have public schools at all efficient.
The necessity is great. The danger to the State of ignorance is more and
more apprehended; and it is upon this that many of the best men of
the South base their urgent appeal for temporary aid from the Federal
Government for public schools. It is seen that a State cannot soundly
prosper unless its laborers are to some degree intelligent. This opinion
is shown in little things. One of the great planters of the Yazoo Delta
told me that he used to have no end of trouble in settling with his
hands. But now that numbers of them can read and cipher, and explain the
accounts to the others, lie never has the least trouble.
One cannot speak too highly of the private schools in the South,
especially of those for young women. I do not know what they were before
the war, probably mainly devoted to “accomplishments,” as most of girls’
schools in the North were. Now most of them are wider in range, thorough
in discipline, excellent in all the modern methods. Some of them, under
accomplished women, are entirely in line with the best in the country.
Before leaving this general subject of education, it is necessary to
say that the advisability of industrial training, as supplementary to
book-learning, is growing in favor, and that in some colored schools it
is tried with good results.
When we come to the New Industrial South the change is marvellous, and
so vast and various that I scarcely know where to begin in a short
paper that cannot go much into details. Instead of a South devoted
to agriculture and politics, we find a South wide awake to business,
excited and even astonished at the development of its own immense
resources in metals, marbles, coal, timber, fertilizers, eagerly laying
lines of communication, rapidly opening mines, building furnaces,
founderies, and all sorts of shops for utilizing the native riches. It
is like the discovery of a new world. When the Northerner finds great
founderies in Virginia using only (with slight exceptions) the products
of Virginia iron and coal mines; when he finds Alabama and Tennessee
making iron so good and so cheap that it finds ready market in
Pennsylvania, and founderies multiplying near the great furnaces for
supplying Northern markets; when he finds cotton-mills running to full
capacity on grades of cheap cottons universally in demand throughout the
South and South-west; when he finds small industries, such as paper-box
factories and wooden bucket and tub factories, sending all they can make
into the North and widely over the West; when he sees the loads of most
beautiful marbles shipped North; when he learns that some of the largest
and most important engines and mill machinery were made in Southern
shops; when he finds in Richmond a “pole locomotive,” made to run on
logs laid end to end, and drag out from Michigan forests and Southern
swamps lumber hitherto inaccessible; when he sees worn-out highlands
in Georgia and Carolina bear more cotton than ever before by help of a
fertilizer the base of which is the cotton-seed itself (worth more as
a fertilizer than it was before the oil was extracted from it); when
he sees a multitude of small shops giving employment to men, women, and
children who never had any work of that sort to do before; and when he
sees Roanoke iron cast in Richmond into car-irons, and returned to a
car-factory in Roanoke which last year sold three hundred cars to the
New York and New England Railroad—he begins to open his eyes. The South
is manufacturing a great variety of things needed in the house, on the
farm, and in the shops, for home consumption, and already sends to the
North and West several manufactured products. With iron, coal, timber
contiguous and easily obtained, the amount sent out is certain to
increase as the labor becomes more skilful. The most striking industrial
development today is in iron, coal, lumber, and marbles; the more
encouraging for the self-sustaining life of the Southern people is the
multiplication of small industries in nearly every city I visited.
When I have been asked what impressed me most in this hasty tour, I have
always said that the most notable thing was that everybody was at work.
In many cities this was literally true: every man, woman, and child
was actively employed, and in most there were fewer idlers than in many
Northern towns. There are, of course, slow places, antiquated methods,
easy-going ways, a-hundred-years-behind-the-time makeshifts, but the
spirit in all the centres, and leavening the whole country, is work.
Perhaps the greatest revolution of all in Southern sentiment is in
regard to the dignity of labor. Labor is honorable, made so by the
example of the best in the land. There are, no doubt, fossils or
Bourbons, sitting in the midst of the ruins of their estates, martyrs
to an ancient pride; but usually the leaders in business and enterprise
bear names well known in politics and society. The nonsense that it is
beneath the dignity of any man or woman to work for a living is pretty
much eliminated from the Southern mind. It still remains true that the
Anglo-Saxon type is prevalent in the South; but in all the cities the
business sign-boards show that the enterprising Hebrew is increasingly
prominent as merchant and trader, and he is becoming a plantation owner
as well.
It cannot be too strongly impressed upon the public mind that the South,
to use a comprehensible phrase, “has joined the procession.” Its mind is
turned to the development of its resources, to business, to enterprise,
to education, to economic problems; it is marching with the North in the
same purpose of wealth by industry. It is true that the railways,
mines, and furnaces could not have been without enormous investments of
Northern capital, but I was continually surprised to find so many and
important local industries the result solely of home capital, made and
saved since the war.
In this industrial change, in the growth of manufactures, the Southern
people are necessarily divided on the national economic problems.
Speaking of it purely from the side of political economy and not of
politics, great sections of the South—whole States, in fact—are becoming
more in favor of “protection” every day. All theories aside, whenever
a man begins to work up the raw material at hand into manufactured
articles for the market, he thinks that the revenue should be so
adjusted as to help and not to hinder him.
Underlying everything else is the negro problem. It is the most
difficult ever given to a people to solve.
It must, under our Constitution, be left to the States concerned, and
there is a general hopefulness that time and patience will solve it to
the advantage of both races. The negro is generally regarded as the
best laborer in the world, and there is generally goodwill towards him,
desire that he shall be educated and become thrifty. The negro has more
confidence now than formerly in the white man, and he will go to him for
aid and advice in everything except politics. Again and again colored
men said to me, “If anybody tells you that any considerable number of
colored men are Democrats, don’t you believe him; it is not so.” The
philanthropist who goes South will find many things to encourage
him, but if he knows the colored people thoroughly, he will lose many
illusions. But to speak of things hopeful, the progress in education, in
industry, in ability to earn money, is extraordinary—much greater than
ought to have been expected in twenty years even by their most sanguine
friends, and it is greater now than at any other period. They are
generally well paid, according to the class of work they do. Usually I
found the same wages for the same class of work as whites received. I
cannot say how this is in remote country districts. The treatment of
laborers depends, I have no doubt, as elsewhere, upon the nature of the
employer. In some districts I heard that the negroes never got out of
debt, never could lay up anything, and were in a very bad condition. But
on some plantations certainly, and generally in the cities, there is an
improvement in thrift shown in the ownership of bits of land and houses,
and in the possession of neat and pretty homes. As to morals, the gain
is slower, but it is discernible, and exhibited in a growing public
opinion against immorality and lax family relations. He is no friend to
the colored people who blinks this subject, and does not plainly say
to them that their position as citizens in the enjoyment of all civil
rights depends quite as much upon their personal virtue and their
acquiring habits of thrift as it does upon school privileges.
I had many interesting talks with representative colored men in
different sections. While it is undoubtedly true that more are
indifferent to politics than formerly, owing to causes already named and
to the unfulfilled promises of wheedling politicians, it would be untrue
to say that there is not great soreness over the present situation.
At Nashville I had an interview with eight or ten of the best colored
citizens, men of all shades of color. One of them was a trusted clerk in
the post-office; another was a mail agent, who had saved money, and
made more by an investment in Birmingham; another was a lawyer of good
practice in the courts, a man of decided refinement and cultivation;
another was at the head of one of the leading transportation lines in
the city, and another had the largest provision establishment in town,
and both were men of considerable property; and another, a slave when
the war ended, was a large furniture dealer, and reputed worth a hundred
thousand dollars. They were all solid, sensible business men, and all
respected as citizens. They talked most intelligently of politics, and
freely about social conditions. In regard to voting in Tennessee
there was little to complain of; but in regard to Mississippi, as an
illustration, it was an outrage that the dominant party had increased
power in Congress and in the election of President, while the colored
Republican vote did not count. What could they do? Some said that
probably nothing could be done; time must be left to cure the wrong.
Others wanted the Federal Government to interfere, at least to the
extent of making a test case on some member of Congress that his
election was illegal. They did not think that need excite anew any race
prejudice. As to exciting race and sectional agitation, we discussed
this question: whether the present marvellous improvement of the colored
people, with general good-will, or at least a truce everywhere, would
not be hindered by anything like a race or class agitation; that is to
say, whether under the present conditions of education and thrift the
colored people (whatever injustice they felt) were not going on faster
towards the realization of all they wanted than would be possible under
any circumstances of adverse agitation. As a matter of policy most of
them assented to this. I put this question: “In the first reconstruction
days, how many colored men were there in the State of Mississippi fitted
either by knowledge of letters, law, political economy, history, or
politics to make laws for the State?” Very few. Well then, it was
unfortunate that they should have attempted it. There are more to-day,
and with education and the accumulation of property the number will
constantly increase. In a republic, power usually goes with intelligence
and property.
Finally I asked this intelligent company, every man of which stood upon
his own ability in perfect self-respect, “What do you want here in the
way of civil rights that you have not?” The reply from one was that he
got the respect of the whites just as he was able to command it by his
ability and by making money, and, with a touch of a sense of injustice,
he said he had ceased to expect that the colored race would get it in
any other way. Another reply was—and this was evidently the deep feeling
of all: “We want to be treated like men, like anybody else, regardless
of color. We don’t mean by this social equality at all; that is a matter
that regulates itself among whites and colored people everywhere. We
want the public conveyances open to us according to the fare we pay;
we want privilege to go to hotels and to theatres, operas and places of
amusement. We wish you could see our families and the way we live; you
would then understand that we cannot go to the places assigned us in
concerts and theatres without loss of self-respect.” I might have said,
but I did not, that the question raised by this last observation is not
a local one, but as wide as the world.
If I tried to put in a single sentence the most widespread and active
sentiment in the South to-day, it would be this: The past is put behind
us; we are one with the North in business and national ambition: we want
a sympathetic recognition of this fact.
VII.—A FAR AND FAIR COUNTRY.
Lewis and Clarke, sent out by Mr. Jefferson in 1804 to discover the
North-west by the route of the Missouri River, left the town of St.
Charles early in the spring, sailed and poled and dragged their boats up
the swift, turbulent, and treacherous stream all summer, wintered with
the Mandan Indians, and reached the Great Falls of the Missouri in about
a year and a quarter from the beginning of their voyage. Now, when we
wish to rediscover this interesting country, which is still virgin land,
we lay down a railway-track in the spring and summer, and go over there
in the autumn in a palace-car—a much more expeditious and comfortable
mode of exploration.
In beginning a series of observations and comments upon Western life it
is proper to say that the reader is not to expect exhaustive statistical
statements of growth or development, nor descriptions, except such as
will illustrate the point of view taken of the making of the Great West.
Materialism is the most obtrusive feature of a cursory observation, but
it does not interest one so much as the forces that underlie it, the
enterprise and the joyousness of conquest and achievement that it stands
for, or the finer processes evolved in the marvellous building up of new
societies. What is the spirit, what is the civilization of the West? I
have not the presumption to expect to answer these large questions to
any one’s satisfaction—least of all to my own—but if I may be permitted
to talk about them familiarly, in the manner that one speaks to his
friends of what interested him most in a journey, and with flexibility
in passing from one topic to another, I shall hope to contribute
something to a better understanding between the territories of a vast
empire. How vast this republic is, no one can at all appreciate who does
not actually travel over its wide areas. To many of us the West is still
the West of the geographies of thirty years ago; it is the simple
truth to say that comparatively few Eastern people have any adequate
conception of what lies west of Chicago and St. Louis: perhaps a hazy
geographical notion of it, but not the faintest idea of its civilization
and society. Now, a good understanding of each other between the great
sections of the republic is politically of the first importance. We
shall hang together as a nation; blood, relationship, steel rails,
navigable waters, trade, absence of natural boundaries, settle that. We
shall pull and push and grumble, we shall vituperate each other, parties
will continue to make capital out of sectional prejudice, and wantonly
inflame it (what a pitiful sort of “politics” that is!), but we shall
stick together like wax. Still, anything like smooth working of our
political machine depends upon good understanding between sections. And
the remark applies to East and West as well as to North and South. It is
a common remark at the West that “Eastern people know nothing about
us; they think us half civilized and there is mingled with slight
irritability at this ignorance a waxing feeling of superiority over
the East in force and power.” One would not say that repose as yet goes
along with this sense of great capacity and great achievement; indeed,
it is inevitable that in a condition of development and of quick growth
unparalleled in the history of the world there should be abundant
self-assertion and even monumental boastfulness.
When the Western man goes East he carries the consciousness of playing
a great part in the making of an empire; his horizon is large; but
he finds himself surrounded by an atmosphere of indifference or
non-comprehension of the prodigiousness of his country, of incredulity
as to the refinement and luxury of his civilization; and self-assertion
is his natural defence. This longitudinal incredulity and swagger is
a curious phenomenon. London thinks New York puts on airs, New York
complains of Chicago’s want of modesty, Chicago can see that Kansas City
and Omaha are aggressively boastful, and these cities acknowledge the
expansive self-appreciation of Denver and Helena.
Does going West work a radical difference in a man’s character? Hardly.
We are all cut out of the same piece of cloth. The Western man is the
Eastern or the Southern man let loose, with his leading-strings cut. But
the change of situation creates immense diversity in interests and in
spirit. One has but to take up any of the great newspapers, say in St.
Paul or Minneapolis, to be aware that he is in another world of ideas,
of news, of interests. The topics that most interest the East he does
not find there, nor much of its news. Persons of whom he reads daily
in the East drop out of sight, and other persons, magnates in politics,
packing, railways, loom up. It takes columns to tell the daily history
of places which have heretofore only caught the attention of the Eastern
reader for freaks of the thermometer, and he has an opportunity to
read daily pages about Dakota, concerning which a weekly paragraph has
formerly satisfied his curiosity. Before he can be absorbed in these
lively and intelligent newspapers he must change the whole current of
his thoughts, and take up other subjects, persons, and places than those
that have occupied his mind. He is in a new world.