THE PERIOD OF WAR AND RECONSTRUCTION
We have seen the results of the patriarchal system under which the
Negro lived in America during the slave era. Then, with the four long
years of war, followed by the eleven (in one State fifteen) long,
weary years of Reconstruction, came the day of testing of the results
of the carefully built up family and trade-school training.
Regarding the war-period and the result of its testing, White and
Negro alike agree. No one is better qualified to speak of it than
the one Negro who knew, and who, more than any man of his day, is
entitled to the credit and the honor of fashioning out of the past a
new and greatly better era for his people and his country, Dr. Booker
T. Washington.
He writes: “The self-control which the Negro exhibited during the
war marks, it seems to me, one of the most important chapters in the
history of the race. Notwithstanding that he knew his master was away
from home fighting a battle which, if successful, would result in his
continued enslavement, yet he worked faithfully for the support of
his master’s family. If the Negro had yielded to the temptation and
suggestion to use the torch or dagger in an attempt to destroy his
master’s property or family, the result would have been that the war
would have been quickly ended; for the master would have returned
from the battlefield to protect and defend his property and family.
But the Negro, to the last, was faithful to the trust that had been
thrust upon him, and during the four years of war, there is not a
single instance recorded where he attempted in any way to outrage the
family or to injure his master’s property.”
His white friends have said as much. Thomas Nelson Page writes: “It
is to the eternal credit of the Whites and of the Negroes that,
during the four years of war, when the white men of the South were
absent in the field, they could entrust their wives, their children,
all they possessed, to the care and guardianship of their slaves with
absolute confidence in their fidelity.” And again: “They raised the
crop that fed the Confederate Army, and suffered without complaint
the privations which came alike to White and Black.”
Those who experienced it all solemnly and sacredly acknowledge the
debt of gratitude to that generation of negro servants which they as
sacredly bequeathed to their posterity. Said a father to his son,
thirty-four years after emancipation, as death was closing his eyes,
“Son, see that my old black people are cared for.” This was his sole
dying injunction.
But what is the significance of the testing of War? It meant that
Africans who, in their native land, had acknowledged no obligation
to anybody outside of tribal ties, whose habit of life had been
constant warfare with all else, had been transformed by new family
ties which embraced, in loyal fidelity, White and Black alike. It
meant that savage people, who had owned no sense of responsibility
save that which protected personal life and furthered personal
wishes, had been so wonderfully tutored as to expand that sense
of responsibility into a loyalty of trust that is little short
of miraculous. A war whose issue was the Negro’s freedom, could
not break that bond of trust. So far, in the character of its
product—both White and Negro—the old family and trade-school had been
tested, and the examination had been passed. When the War closed,
the old friendship was as strong as ever, and the mutual relation
closer than ever. In most cases, their freedom was first announced to
their former slaves by the old masters; and both together set about
the establishment of the new relations with hearty good will and the
united desire “to re-build our homes.”
* * * * *
Then came the Reconstruction Period, with its testing of a very
different nature. Here again, let us hear what the Negro has to say,
and learn from himself his response. Dr. Washington writes: “At the
close of the War, both the southern white man and the Negro found
themselves in the midst of poverty. The ex-master returned from the
war to find his slave-property gone, his farms and other industries
in a state of collapse, and the whole industrial and economic system,
upon which he had depended for years, entirely disorganized.
As we review, calmly and dispassionately, the period of
reconstruction, we must use a great deal of sympathy and generosity.
The weak point, to my mind, in the reconstruction era was that no
strong force was brought to bear in the direction of preparing the
Negro to become an intelligent, reliable citizen and voter. The
main effort seemed to have been in the direction of controlling
his vote for the time being, regardless of future interests. I
hardly believe that any race of people, with similar preparation
and similar surroundings, would have acted more wisely than, or
very differently from, the way the Negro acted during the period of
reconstruction.... I do not believe that the Negro was so much at
fault for entering so largely into politics, and for the mistakes
that were made in too many cases, as were the unscrupulous white
leaders who got the Negro’s confidence, and controlled his vote, to
further their own ends, regardless, in many cases, of the permanent
welfare of the Negro. I have always considered it unfortunate that
the southern white man did not make more effort during the period
of reconstruction to get the confidence and sympathy of the Negro,
and thus have been able to keep him in close touch and sympathy in
politics.... What the Negro wants, and what the country wants to do,
is to take advantage of all the lessons that were taught during the
days of reconstruction, and apply these lessons bravely and honestly
in laying the foundation upon which the Negro can stand in the
future, and make himself a useful, honorable and desirable citizen,
whether he has his new residence in the North, the South, or the
West.”
The description is true. The white friend would have written this one
sentence differently—“I have always considered it unfortunate that
the Southern white man did not make more effort—to get the confidence
of the Negro....” The misfortune was, that the old southern friends
were not permitted to retain the confidence of their old Negro
friends who were estranged and filled with suspicion by the same
“unscrupulous white leaders who got the Negro’s confidence—to further
their own ends.” Time and time again, during this era, far-seeing
Southerners, sometimes against the vigorous protest of their
neighbors, offered small farms to their old servants at very low
prices, which would provide homes of self-respect and stem the tide
of temptation to wander and to idle about. Not a few accepted the
advice of their old and best friends; but the new toy of ownership
was too alluring. In nearly all cases the feeling of wealth in
possession bred spendthrift habits and the early loss of the farms.
But our purpose is not to trace the story of reconstruction. This has
been amply told by Southerners—Thomas Nelson Page and others; and by
Northerners—Carl Schurz, Rhodes and others. Our purpose is to note
the result of this testing-time upon the pupils trained in the old
plantation trade-school.
Again the answer is given by Dr. Washington, whose testimony is
substantially that of his race of that generation. “This business
contact with the southern white man, and the industrial training
received on the plantations, put the Negro, at the close of the war,
into possession of all the common and skilled labor of the South.
For nearly twenty years after the war, except in one or two cases,
the value of the industrial training given by the Negroes’ former
masters on the plantations and elsewhere was overlooked. Negro men
and women were educated in literature, mathematics and the sciences,
with no thought of what had taken place on these plantations for two
and one half centuries. After twenty years, those who were trained
as mechanics, etc., during slavery, began to disappear by death;
and gradually we awoke to the fact that we had no one to take their
places. We had scores of young men learned in Greek; but few in
carpentry, or mechanical or architectural drawing. We had trained
many in Latin; but almost none as engineers, bridge-builders, and
machinists. Numbers were taken from the farm and educated, but were
educated in everything else except agriculture. Hence they had no
sympathy with farm life, and did not return to it.”
The real fact is, that, as a result of the reconstruction policies,
quite fifteen years were well nigh lost in the development of the
Negro. For what is the value of tuition in Greek and Latin and the
finer arts, for a few of the brighter minds—so few as barely to touch
the fringe of the great race—compared with the prevailing temporary
loss of the advantages of generations of training in practical arts,
the racial estrangement in their old homes, and the long years of
protected idleness and sloth such as Carl Schurz describes?
During this Reconstruction Period, the religious life as well as the
industrial life of the Negro was disturbed and oftentimes destroyed
with a resultant loss in the development of good citizenship.
The condition of the Church in the South, where so vast a majority of
the Negroes were destined to retain their homes, is beyond a healthy
imagination now to picture. The armies of the long years of war had
swept over them from Virginia to Texas. The Rev. Bowyer Stewart, in
his _Hale Memorial Sermon_ of 1913, gives a summary, the accuracy of
which may be accepted. In Virginia, some 14 churches were destroyed,
and 24 more or less damaged; in South Carolina, 13 churches
destroyed, and 26 chapels for Negroes; in Tennessee, only 3 churches
escaped injury; while in Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas and
Louisiana, the conditions were somewhat worse than in North Carolina.
The many churches and schools put to military use, meant the
destruction of furniture and the abuse of buildings, which rendered
the latter useless for the time. Episcopal residences and rectories,
in some cases, suffered either total or partial destruction. The
poverty was very great. A careful examination, reported to the South
Carolina Convention, in 1868, showed that “along the entire seaboard,
from North Carolina to Georgia, where our Church had flourished for
more than a century, there are but four parishes which maintain
religious services; not one, outside the city of Charleston, can
be called a living, self-sustaining parish; their clergy live by
fishing, farming and mechanic arts.” Other Dioceses, though in less
measure, as a rule, experienced great loss and great poverty.
But there were great men at the helm—Bishops Johns, Atkinson, Davis
(soon succeeded by Howe), Elliott, the two Wilmers, Quintard,
Lay, and Gregg. The five years to 1871, showed recovery of white
communicants in nearly every Diocese except South Carolina. All
alike had lost many of their negro members, the greatest loss
being in South Carolina which originally had most. South Carolina,
however, is a fairly typical illustration of the comparative loss of
negro members throughout the South. In 1861, the Diocesan Journal
records 2979 white communicants and 2973 colored; that of 1872, 3102
white, 618 colored, most of these in Calvary Church and St. Mark’s,
Charleston.
Why was this? The facts are the more astonishing when one reflects
upon the universal practice of the Church, during so many
generations, of close religious association; upon the success of
Christian teaching so apparently universal upon the complete trust
in one another exhibited during the test of war; and the resultant
feeling of affectionate gratitude on the part of the white Churchmen.
Moreover, the latter were prepared to continue the Christian
ministrations under the new order in the confident expectation
that, however changed the economic and social relation, nothing
could sever the bond of Christian fellowship in the Church. Bishop
Davis, in 1866, was expressing a conviction universally shared when,
looking out upon the vast confusion, he nevertheless declared, “I
have not complete statistics; but am convinced, from observation and
information, that, in all cases where the colored population shall
be reinstated in their former localities, they will return to the
communion of the Church.” Unfortunately, however, succeeding years
bore testimony to progressive losses, until another Bishop voiced
the thought which experience, in turn, had universally brought: “The
defection from the Church is almost universal. In some parishes I
have visited, which a few years ago numbered more than a hundred
communicants, not one has come forward to kneel at the altar, and
very few to enter the church. The voice of remonstrance from their
once-honored pastors falls unheeded upon their ears; unscriptural
revelation are substituted for the Word of God; the ancient forms
of worship are declared to quench the ministrations of the Spirit;
and the sober worship of the sanctuary is exchanged for the midnight
orgies of a frantic superstition.” There are some very bright and
cheering exceptions, but this quotation from Bishop Wilmer, of
Louisiana, describes the rule.
Why was it? The question may not be answered in a short phrase, and
probably may not be answered satisfactorily at all.
There was the fact that the Negro’s religious teachers had been
his masters, beloved under the old régime, but whose guidance and
control, even in church, was to be regarded with wary suspicion. He
could not differentiate between the essential wrong of a system, and
the blessing which the Church had brought to him in that system. For
the present, the wrong was uppermost in his mind.
Then there was the reconstruction system, and the hope held, in
confident expectation, of a change in condition which a changed
social relation would miraculously effect. The negro masses could not
foresee the slow, toilsome pathway up which every primitive race has
plodded to changed conditions, and better.
Again, there was the natural conviction of the Negro that his freed
allegiance was now due to his northern liberators; and this, beyond
any bond of slave-time friendship with those who had held him in
slavery. It was the newborn freedom, from restraint, entering like
new wine into old vessels overstrained.
Finally, there was among the few negro leaders, (and, because few,
therefore all the more powerful) the exultant and alluring ambition
to play the man, and to attempt to demonstrate the full-grown
majority of a race just dropping its swaddling clothes.
These were the conditions (inevitable to the change of social
structure from slave to free) ready at hand when the reconstruction
policies offered the chance to unscrupulous politicians from North
and South. They offered a ready opportunity for inspiring the Negro
with a subtle distrust of former masters now become neighbors.
Racial hatred for the wrongs of slavery, now became magnified to
the exclusion of any benefits whatever derived from the system. For
the unscrupulous, the rewards increased with the widening of the
chasm between race and race; they were secured at the price of the
ruthless exploitation of the Negroes, and the breeding of a spirit of
suspicion and distrust toward their old friends.
To the positive and infallible declarations to the Negroes that
allegiance to the Church of their masters meant the continuation of
slavery, the great racial instinct, as yet untutored to know better,
responded with tremendous and deep fervor. Only the few could know
better, and have the courage to follow their own convictions. And
what else could have been possible in view of the actual conditions?
Had wiser counsels prevailed, and had old racial and personal
attachments and interdependencies, so carefully built up, been
fostered as the best condition under which to work out the stupendous
problems of the new time, no one can doubt that the story of American
life would have been different, and few can doubt that it would have
been better. As it was, the conditions which served the unworthy ends
of the white demagogue, were sadly fruitful in heartrending results
upon the religion of the Negro.
For many, there was the clinging memory of heathen
superstitions—hardly asleep—certainly not dead. There was the “call
of the wild”—powerful over all nature, however highly developed—and
now heard by a people only just freed from the leash. What race in
all history has ever faced such sudden, such powerful temptations as
were freely cast before this people, backed up by military occupancy?
The amazing thing is, that they stood before such temptations with as
little resulting harm to themselves and to the Whites as may justly
be charged against either.
It was not alone, or even chiefly, that this was made possible by
precautions to prevent racial clashes. It was, before everything
else, because of the two centuries of American life in which the
Negroes had more and more progressed in all that goes to transform
heathen savages into Christian men and women, and had earned the
right of trust and affection without the clogging burden of vast
responsibility impossible of fulfilment. Dr. Washington is right
when he says, as already noted, “I do not believe that the Negro was
so much at fault ... for the mistakes that were made in too many
cases, as were the unscrupulous white leaders who got the Negroes’
confidence ... to further their own ends.”
Those years of association had produced their intimate, confidential
friendships between the white master and the strong head-men on
every plantation—friendships which nothing could destroy; and every
community points back to level headed, wise, older Negroes who saw,
though they could not fully measure, the seriousness brought by the
new day. The quiet, almost secret conferences of these old friends
about the new life, entered as leaven into the great unleavened,
working, dismayed mass. The break became a chasm as reconstruction
advanced. The race had not yet had time to become established.
We must note, too, that slavery, however serviceable in the
discipline of a new people, did not conduce to self-reliance in any
walk of life; it was not the favorable condition out of which to
develop steadfastness in the religious life so essential to desirable
citizenship. “The law is the schoolmaster to lead to Christ,” is not
only the terse description of a long episode in the history of our
religious forefathers, it is still more the expression of the law
of religious growth. First, there is the period of the imposition
of law, with its tuition of restraint from without, gradually
developing into self-imposed control as the sense of the reasonable
justice and righteousness of it develops. Then the habit of balanced
self-restraint, as the motive of righteousness, becomes instinct with
life through the growth of the Christ-life in us, when the pattern
life is the only life dominant over conscience.
To have expected this process to be completed, and its fruits
full-grown, in any considerable number of this newly, partially
converted people, was certainly unreasonable. It is our complaint of
our own race, that, after more than twelve centuries of inherited
Christian faith, we are so far from this consummation. At the very
best, slavery was the reign of law, but with no settled objective
toward the full “liberty of the children of God”; and as long as St.
Paul’s law of development was arrested in mid-operation, it had scant
chance of complete fruition.
In an age of progressive education through the printed page, this
accepted means of hastening tuition in religious knowledge and
spiritual character, was withheld from the slave as inapplicable,
even dangerous, to his condition. While it may be recalled that
Christianity flourished before printing, it is enough to say that
human progress is the product of its own age, and the condition of an
age retards him who declines or is deprived of conformity to it, as
readily as it stimulates him who conforms.
Such is our attempt to explain the very great defection of the Negro
from the white Churches after the war. Doubtless it falls short of
being a complete explanation, but it seems to be at least a natural
one.
The year 1880 may properly be considered as marking the close of the
period of the War and Reconstruction. With exceptions noted later,
the period was one of consternation to the leaders of the Church,
and deep regret over what seemed the failure of the long years of
devoted ministry; for the negro race had shown retrogression in every
way, religiously, morally, and industrially. Those twenty years of
lost opportunity of which Dr. Washington wrote, were lost to all save
the very few who were strong enough to yield themselves to the best
influences, and steadfastly to build that best into themselves. To
the Church leaders of the day, all seemed lost. But was all lost?
The answer of faith is an emphatic NO!
The Episcopal Church lost uncounted numbers of members. Some of these
doubtless were never shepherded to any earthly fold. Most of them,
with no education to add power to a half-formed faith, became partial
victims of the temptations of traditional heathen religions. But
the newly born and developing faith was not lost, even though the
Fathers’ anxiety and profound distress over the lapse of spiritual
children to “indications of African barbarism” are pathetic excuse
for their despair. It would have been as unnatural for the Whites
to measure the full significance of this day of complete revolution
in the life of the Negroes, as for the Negroes to escape the first
consequences of it. Nor was it possible for such an era to end in
a day. Other peoples have had revolutions, and with like results.
The French Revolution, with nearly 1700 years of Christian training
behind its victims, and its consequences still a factor of no small
power in French life, is a pointed instance. Indeed eras, good or
bad, do not really end; they carry forward and onward. The era of
Reconstruction carried onward in American life; and, in like manner,
the era of Slavery, with its mingled beneficence and cruelty,
its Christian and industrial training intertwined with heathen
traditions, its régime of earnest, zealous, loving ministry, its
“line upon line and precept upon precept” of unwearying tuition—this,
too, for better or worse, influenced the Negro of a later period.
When, at length, the excesses inevitably connected with the
new-found freedom had ceased, and when the years of loss had come to
an end, then the old training, religious and industrial, and the need
for its power in racial development came once more to the fore in the
minds of these few truly great and conspicuous leaders whose lives
spanned the great gulf of past and present. These were able to wrest
much of advantage to their race out of the very mistakes in education
which Dr. Washington laments.
We have reminded ourselves of the tremendous, the indescribably
difficult, task of the very small band of negro leaders, in guiding
their people to a saner life and to the ambition to fill life with
the best that God’s gifts to them would enable. Of such, were
Bishop Payne, of the African Methodist Church; John Jasper, the
famous Richmond preacher; Alexander Crummell, of the Episcopal
Church; Henry M. Turner, of the African Methodist Church; Isaiah
Montgomery, of Mount Bayou, Mississippi; and, of the younger men,
Booker T. Washington and his successor Robert R. Moton, Archdeacon
Russell, Dr. Bragg, Dr. Tunnell, Dr. Dubois, Bishop Demby, Professor
Battle, and many others of their generation. What a load they have
had to carry as represented by ignorance, superstition, low moral
tone, shiftlessness and unresponse in the vast majority of their
brethren! What a task, to overcome the losses of that very era which
produced their younger men! What a supreme faith, what unswerving
confidence in their great mission, were demanded, and in large
measure provided! We can but reflect that, whether or no the Whites
recognize the wisdom of the methods and philosophies of one or all or
any of the negro leaders, the greatest sin we can commit toward them
is to withhold our sympathy from them in their toilsome, troublous,
tragic, upward pathway along which, with sweat of blood, they must
lead the millions of their brethren. The demand of their condition,
ever since Reconstruction, has been, and is now, for that patient,
helpful sympathy from which confidence is born, the confidence which
invites mutual conference, the correction of error, the enlightenment
of motive and objective, and so on to a common task to which White
and Negro alike can devote their best efforts.
As Dr. Washington says, it was too late to cry over what might have
been. The era produced at least one institution (possibly there may
have been others) which a wise head conceived—Hampton Institute,
Virginia. General Armstrong, with equally wise retrospect and
foresight, builded upon the past for an enduring future—a future that
would restore the best in the past, and make the best better. Hampton
would have been a success even had it died after producing Booker
T. Washington, founder of Tuskegee Institute; and James S. Russell,
founder of St Paul’s School, Lawrenceville, Va.
There was something, too, that the Reconstruction Era could not
destroy. It could fan racial prejudices, and set race against race
in political antagonism; but it could not destroy the deep, ever
abiding affections between the races, which the old life had
nurtured. That remained as both the motive for redeeming the time,
and the foundation for the rebuilded life so sadly shattered and
dismembered. The era ended, white and black again took up the task of
rebuilding.
Of the total negro population, in 1880, about 95 per cent were still
in the South; and, in 1920, after forty years of development, and
in spite of the enticement of the fabulous wages in manufacturing
States created by the World War, this percentage is still nearly 75
per cent. The South is the Negro’s home, and the conditions of his
greatest opportunity are there. This is the testimony of both black
and white observers. Read Edgar Gardner Murphy’s _Problems of the
Present South_ (p. 184 _et seq._); DuBois’s _The Philadelphia Negro_;
and this passage from the address by the Principal of Tuskegee which,
in short, expresses the witness of all alike: “Wherever the Negro
has lost ground, industrially, in the South, it is not because there
is prejudice against him, as a skilled laborer, on the part of the
native southern white man.... There is almost no prejudice, against
the Negro in the South in matters of business, so far as the native
Whites are concerned.” This was published in 1899. Since then, Labor
Unions have had a disconcerting relation to the matter—a relation
still in solution. But certainly there was a free field for the Negro
for about half a century, coupled with about as much help from the
white people as they could give and as the Negro would seek; from
the Northern White also, about as much as the Negro could profitably
use. The results of these fifty years seem to prove this, and to
offer irrefutable evidence of the excellent preparatory work of the
old patriarchal system which we have reviewed in a previous chapter.