as its early publications abundantly show, and has ever refused to
accept the limitation of a color line. Its schools and churches
have seemed to be almost wholly confined to the blacks, solely
because it allowed them to enter at all. But it has not confined
itself entirely to efforts for that race. It has founded schools
and churches mainly white. The church in Jacksonville, Fla., was
organized under its auspices. Its founders did not ask pecuniary
aid, but they did ask one of our District Secretaries to assist
in the organization, which he did, and spent nearly a month with
them afterward, supplying the pulpit until a permanent pastor
could be obtained. In Kentucky, John G. Fee, its first missionary
in the South, commissioned in 1848, formed white churches on an
anti-slavery basis. The same was done by Daniel Worth in North
Carolina. That church planting in Kentucky was followed by Berea
College, the most conspicuous example in the South of an anti-caste
institution, its pupils being in nearly equal numbers of both
races; and now more recently the example of Berea has been followed
by a church and school in Williamsburg, Ky., and in Clover Bottom.
Other openings of the same sort are presenting themselves in the
same region.
The only movement made by Congregationalists to found white
churches in the territory occupied by the Association was begun
during or soon after the war. At that time the work of the
Association was in its infancy, and the broad and permanent
foundations which it has since laid were scarcely anticipated. On
the other hand, this new movement for white churches was mainly
confined to the largest cities and perhaps the thought of possible
competition was not entertained. At all events the movement was not
very successful and was very nearly abandoned.
Whatever general impressions may have existed at that early day
as to the special work of the Association or whatever special
designations may since have been used as to the classes for
which it was mainly to labor, it never supposed that it was
to be confined entirely to those classes; and certainly now,
after nearly twenty years of almost exclusive occupancy of the
special territory to which it has confined itself, so far as
Congregationalists are concerned, it may well be supposed to look
with some surprise upon a movement recently inaugurated to enter
that same territory with missionary efforts that practically places
it on one side of a color line.
An agreement was made between the two societies when this question
came before them, which provides temporarily and tentatively
against the repetition of any such interferences as that which
started this discussion. Both societies have agreed not to enter
into any field occupied by the other without mutual consultation.
But this agreement provides no permanent basis for a settlement of
the question which field each society shall occupy. It only insures
Christian co-operation and forbearance until a settlement be made.
What that settlement shall be is for the constituency of our
societies to determine, and to them we must leave it. The American
Board and the Association have made a harmonious arrangement of
their respective fields of labor, and it is to be hoped that an
adjustment equally satisfactory may be reached with the American
Home Missionary Society.
In view of all this several questions ought to be considered.
1. What is the field open before us among the white population of
the South?
It is not the extent of the territory, nor the number of millions
of white people that are in the South, nor even the number that
need our school and Gospel advantages, but it is: _How many of them
can be reached by an anti-caste Gospel?_
It is not enough to say that we are to preach the Gospel, and if
people are converted the caste question will take care of itself.
Well do I remember when that plea and policy were in vogue in
regard to slavery. The Gospel was preached, churches were formed,
and the denominations were happy in their enlargement. Slavery also
did take care of itself, and good care, too, for it found snug
homes in these very churches. And well do I remember when these
same denominations cast slavery away from them and the coveted
churches along with it!
The American churches cannot afford to repeat that experience in
regard to caste. What was done then in comparative innocence,
because done in ignorance, cannot now be done without great guilt
in the light of that experience. We must remember that it is more
important to destroy caste than to found churches that will sustain
caste. No work can be done by our churches among the white people
of the South that will stand the test, that does not proceed on
the avowed and practical repudiation of caste; no school opened
that does not welcome the colored child; no church formed that
does not present the open door, the open hand and the open heart
to “Our Brother in Black.” There are Congregationalists in the
South that are ready to welcome again the polity of New England
and at the same time welcome among them the colored races, and
there are native Southerners ready for our schools and churches,
and also ready to make no distinction on account of color, and to
all such we ought to carry with joyful hearts and ready hands the
institutions we so much cherish. But we ought not to enter upon the
effort under a misapprehension. The number of openings for this
kind of labor is not great.
2. The question of two Congregational Societies on the Southern
field receives its greatest importance from its relation to
caste-prejudice. There are other difficulties. One of the saddest
features of the modern church extension at the West is the starting
of two or more feeble churches of different denominations in
small villages or among sparse populations, creating frictions
and rivalries where harmony and Christian fellowship are so
essential, and a waste of men and money where there is so much need
of economy. This would be aggravated in the poorer and sparser
settlements of the South, and still more aggravated if the same
denomination should, by two of its own societies there, thus come
into rivalry with itself. In the one case two houses are arrayed
against each other; in the other, a house is divided against
itself. It is the same railroad company running parallel lines in
competition with each other.
But all these considerations, grave as they are, are of small
importance when compared with the danger that the division of the
labors of two societies, running mainly along the color line,
would be construed as lending the sanction of the denomination to
caste separation. This is the gravamen of the difficulty. I am
happy to say that the two societies are equally committed against
caste, and will equally and honorably repudiate all intentional
sanction of it. But the bare fact that one is avowedly working
mainly for the whites and the other mainly for the blacks, will,
in spite of all protests to the contrary, array them before the
public as separated only by the color line. It is not proper for
me to speak for another society, but for my own I must speak. The
American Missionary Association was born an opponent of slavery.
Amid poverty, sneers and reproach from the best of men, as well as
the worst of men, it pressed forward in its opposition till the
glorious end came. It must oppose caste as it did slavery. It began
its work among the freedmen as the avowed enemy of caste, and amid
much misapprehension and reproach at the South, it has pressed
onward until it has gained the respect of both races. That position
it cannot, and it ought not to be asked to, surrender or jeopardize
by being placed on one side of a line of separation in missionary
labors that has no reason for its existence except the colors of
the people to be benefited.
3. If, in view of all the facts, it should be ultimately decided
that the Congregational churches should be represented at the South
by one missionary society, the decision should be reached in the
broadest spirit of Christian wisdom and kindness.
The American Missionary Association is not eager to be pushed
forward into the mission work among the whites, but it knows
something of their needs, especially their need of deliverance
from caste-prejudice that mars the symmetry of their piety and
chills their hearts as slavery did, and that perpetuates a race
antagonism that must be crushed before the South can be safe or
prosperous. If the Association should be called to that work, it
has some experiences and facilities that would be helpful. Its past
record would be a guaranty that it would not foster caste. It would
have no temptation to found schools and churches mainly white that
should be rivals of its schools and churches mainly colored, and
it could have no reason to hesitate in establishing both, if both
were needed. It is not “handicapped” for this work except by its
firm and well-known attitude against caste, and any other society
equally faithful on that subject would soon be equally handicapped.
Its large planting of schools and churches, with a value of
property of nearly a million of dollars, gives it a position and an
influence that it would take any other society a long time and a
large outlay of funds to acquire—to say nothing of the facilities
it thus possesses to extend its work among both races. It has a
wide acquaintance with the Southern people, both white and colored,
and has won for itself a large place in their confidence, by its
quiet, unselfish and useful work for both. It has, moreover,
already done something in bringing the two races together in school
and church, and for this reason it is fitted to be a bond of union
and Christian fellowship between them.
This Association, standing on the ruins of slavery, and amid the
schools and churches it has erected thereon for the benefit of the
colored race, and to some extent also for the white, would find it
both cognate and congenial to enlarge its work among the whites,
both the ignorant and the educated, carrying to them a gospel
that is not only uplifting and purifying, but that makes no caste
distinction in the school room or in the house of God.
* * * * *
REPORT ON EDUCATIONAL WORK.
The Committee on the Educational Work of the A. M. A. would
respectfully report that they find the history of the past year
highly satisfactory and encouraging. It is a record of enlarged
accommodations at several of the institutions. Stone Hall, at
Atlanta, the fourth of the buildings erected by the munificence of
Mrs. Valeria G. Stone, has been completed. New buildings, or very
considerable additions to former buildings, have been constructed
at Midway, Macon, Talladega, Williamsburg, Hillsboro, Memphis and
New Orleans; yet from several quarters the call still comes for
more room.
It is a record of increased practical efficiency. Industrial
training, which forms so important an adjunct of the work, has been
making progress by workshops established at Macon and Memphis, and
arrangements for carpentry schools at Tougaloo and Atlanta; while
farming education and training in housekeeping go on at various
points as heretofore, supplemented at Memphis by instruction in
nursing and hygiene; and Hampton continues to teach more vigorously
than ever a variety of handicrafts, such as printing, bookbinding,
iron and tin work, carpentry and wood turning, the manufacture of
sash and doors, shoe and harness making, tailoring and farming.
All this is, for the present, a very essential element of the
educational work.
It is a record of some degree of expansion, although the main
aspect is rather one of consolidation and elevation. The number of
teachers has increased by twenty-eight and the number of common
schools by four; the number of pupils being but slightly greater
than last year. The grade of these institutions is steadily
advancing. Among these pupils are found, we are happy to say,
ninety theological students—twelve more than were reported last
year. The three Teachers’ Institutes, held in as many States, may
prove to be the entering wedge of another great instrument of
power and quickening influence. The crowded halls and interested
audiences of the anniversaries of so many of our Institutions are
a striking manifestation of genuine progress. When we remember
that the oldest of these institutions has seen but a quarter of a
century, and practically but twenty years of life time, and that
now we rejoice in eight chartered institutions, comparatively
strong and effective, twelve high and normal schools and forty-two
common schools, with 279 teachers doing their soul-expanding work,
we may well say “What hath God wrought.” Far as it falls short of
our desire and our duty, so far and more also does it exceed the
boldest reasonable expectations of the dark and cloudy time of the
beginning.
But far the most satisfactory statement of the annual report is
its record of the religious spirit which guides, controls and
pervades this whole educational movement. The information that at
seven out of eight of the chartered institutions “special religious
interest has been manifest, adding scores and scores of these
scholars to the number of the disciples of Christ,” and that, “as
yet, but very few have been graduated from our various courses of
study who had not become Christians,” is a record of the crowning
mercy of God. So may it ever be. The heart and conscience must be
quickened with the intellect or there is no good hope for that
race, or for any other race. It must be _Christian_ education. The
school and the Church must move on together at the South as they
started together from Plymouth Rock, and they must extend, as far
as possible—certainly must offer—their joint benign influences, not
to a portion of the population, but to all classes and races alike.
For the part can receive its full benefit only in conjunction
with the benefit of the whole. This is no new principle, but the
method in which, as our annual reports show, this Association has
been proceeding throughout its history. Having always refused to
recognize the color-line, it can proceed on no other basis without
defeating its own ends, and compromising its own principles. And
the recent decision of the Supreme Court has rolled a new burden on
the Church.
Hence it is that your committee look with much interest upon
the experiment, tried and effectually settled at Berea, and now
extending thence among the “mountain whites,” of including all
classes and races in the purview of our educational and Christian
work. We refer to the movement at Williamsburg, a county-seat
on the Cumberland River, which is simply a repetition of the
movement at Berea of twenty years ago—with this difference, that
the abolition of the color-line, both in church and school,
at Williamsburg, is fully accepted beforehand by an actual
constituency in that place. Here the establishment of an academy
to educate teachers for the common schools of the county—of whom,
as of the population, but a small portion are colored persons—went
hand in hand with the opening of the church to both races alike,
and has led most naturally to the establishment of three adjacent
preaching places, and the formation of another church at the
nearest railway station. This method, when viewed simply on its
own merits, seems to be at once the dictate of a wise Christian
economy, and an almost necessary sequence, or rather part, of the
work of Christian education. Within the particular regions where
this Association is planting its schools, exerting its influence
and gaining the confidence of the community, it would seem to
have peculiar advantages and a special call to leaven the whole
community with the institutions of the gospel; while the molding
influence of its Christian schools will be left incomplete, except
as permanently embodied, fortified and nourished by surrounding
Christian churches, built upon the same fundamental principles.
Similar in condition, character and wants to this Whitley County,
in Kentucky, is a great area of five hundred miles by two hundred,
beginning in Virginia and extending to Alabama, occupied chiefly by
a white population numbering nearly two millions, of whom more than
half the adults can neither read nor write. It is one of the most
needy and neglected regions of our country, and presents a pressing
call to Christian philanthropy to enter and occupy.
S. C. BARTLETT, Chairman.
* * * * *
ADDRESS OF PRESIDENT S. C. BARTLETT.
There is perhaps some propriety in my saying an earnest word for
the educational work of this Association, representing as I do a
college that from its birth abolished the color line in education.
More than a century ago Dartmouth College was training the red
man and more than half a century ago the black man. Our first six
graduates included three missionaries to the Indians, and the last
class that entered contains a full-blooded Dakota and a Cherokee.
Fifty-nine years ago, twenty-two years before the first anniversary
of this Association, we were educating the negro. In 1824 a young
man from Martinique, of irreproachable character and conduct, but
with some African color and African blood in his veins, applied
for admission. Objections were raised in some quarters from the
fear that his presence would prove unwelcome. The students heard
of it, held meetings and sent a committee to urge his reception,
and under the direction of a most conservative Board of Trustees,
with Dr. Bennet Tyler at its head, he was admitted, and into one of
the most distinguished classes in the history of the institution.
There, in company with forty classmates, who from that small number
have furnished six college professors, two theological professors,
two college presidents, two Indian missionaries, a senator of the
United States and a judge of a Supreme Court, Edward Mitchell went
on in comfort, graduated with honor and did a good work in the
Baptist ministry. Since then many colored men have entered without
hindrance, inconvenience, disability or disrespect. They have been
the equal companions and in some instances the room-mates of their
fellow students. In June last two such young men graduated, one of
them an appointment man and a commencement speaker.
We know the colored man as a student, a Christian and a gentleman.
And without making contrasts or comparisons, I will say that were
all our students as irreproachable as these last two colored men,
there would be no more discipline in the institution. We might burn
our college laws.
I have seen the colored student elsewhere in Northern schools. Some
of you remember that choice young man, Barnabas Root, a Christian
scholar in America, though the son of a heathen chief in Africa.
I well remember his graduating oration at Knox College, second to
no other on that occasion. I remember him as three years a student
in Chicago Theological Seminary, in all respects the peer of his
classmates. When that young man passed away just on the threshold
of his missionary career, it was a grievous loss to his race and to
the church.
It is not necessary to say that all are like these. But these show
what can be and sometimes will be. Educationally, they are a most
hopeful race, because, in the main eager for improvement. And with
whatever deductions, it may be doubted whether the summons to awake
and arise intellectually, socially and morally ever fell on the
ears of six or seven millions of people with such a simultaneous
thrill of response. When I look out on our educational work at the
South, I am greatly impressed with what has been already done, even
more than I am oppressed with what remains to be done.
What have you done? No doubt it was a notable plan of the French
authorities in this country near two hundred years ago to encircle
this young nation with a chain of military stations from the Gulf
of St. Lawrence to the Gulf of Mexico. But this Association has
done better than that. You have gone not to the outskirts, but to
the centre. You have planted your cordon of educational fortresses
from the Potomac and the Ohio almost to the Rio Grande, through
the heart of the South in all the great slave-holding States. They
are there to stay and to re-construct. They are already working
powerfully, not alone on the education of individual young men and
young women, but on the education of the community and of public
sentiment. What a change has the President of the Board of Trustees
of Berea College lived to behold—the man who was robbed and driven
out, but who now sees white men and black in nearly equal numbers
graduating together, and audiences of three or four thousand
gathered to hear them. And these sixteen other anniversaries lately
chronicled in the AMERICAN MISSIONARY, with their interested
audiences and crowded halls, sometimes in stately buildings, are
the signal tokens of a great transformation.
No more significant testimony could be given to this change than a
sort of wail in the _Atlantic Monthly_ over the “New Departure in
Negro Life,” a lament over the decadence of “the jocund customs of
the past,” with its thoughtless levity and hilarity, and over the
“half-hearted manner in which the characteristic festivities that
remain are gone through with.” What does it mean? It means, says
the writer, that “an unmistakable change in the negro character is
at hand, and in an advanced state of progress. He is putting away
childish things and striving in his own crude way to grasp matters
of higher import. The bulk of the race have learned to read after a
fashion. His primer, his _vade mecum_, is the Bible. Never before,
perhaps, in the history of the world, have two decades brought
about such a manifest change in a race. Religion, religionism,
forms the staple of his speech by day, and the stuff that his
dreams are made of by night.”
Would that the picture was more completely true. But, thank God, it
is at least founded on fact. The race is aroused, and in earnest.
It is bent on accumulation, education, elevation. The world may pay
as little heed to the movement as did the Roman world in the time
of Tacitus to the Christian Church in the Eternal City; but the
time is not distant when the world will see that this quiet work is
one of the great movements of modern history.
* * * * *
CHRISTIAN EDUCATION AT THE SOUTH.
BY REV. WASHINGTON GLADDEN, D.D.
The problem that confronts us this morning is that which is
presented by the illiteracy of this country, and especially of
the Southern States. This is not the only problem before this
Association; the problem of the irreligion and heathenism which
infest many regions also claims our energies. There is moral
evil as well as ignorance to be met and fought and overcome. The
Association has an evangelical work as well as an educational work
in its hands; and though, as we shall see, these two are properly
one, yet it is now convenient to consider them separately. It is
the educational work that is now before us.
We educate, because education is the servant of a pure religion. We
educate, because we are the missionaries of a faith which always
adds to itself virtue, and to its virtue knowledge. We educate,
because a genuine Christianity always educates; because the work
of the pulpit, the work of the Church everywhere must always be,
in considerable part, the work of education; but, more especially,
we of this Association educate, because the peoples with whom we
work are in peculiar need of education; and because nothing but
intelligence will ever break the fetters of degrading superstition
by which they are held, and lead them forth into the liberty of the
sons of God.