There is something sublime in the spectacle of an earnest man
contending for his cause. The sublimity is heightened when we remember
that his cause and his convictions are identical, without any reckoning
of the cost. Of this character was the figure of Dr. Atticus G. Haygood
on the Chautauqua platform, uttering brave words for the Negro, his
former slave, but present fellow-citizen. Nor did we have to wait till
opportunity made him heard at Chautauqua. From the close of the war
until now, he has been a moulder and leader of the best sentiment in
the South, and has occupied advanced ground upon all questions relating
to the education and welfare of the liberated slave. His recent book,
“Our Brother in Black,” is the ablest contribution we have had to the
“Negro question.” It breathes throughout the same generous, Christian
sentiment and sympathy that characterize all his utterances and his
work elsewhere. Nor is the word “battle” too strong a term to be
used. When we remember the jealousies, hates, and prejudices of long
standing, and greatly intensified by the war; and how they have been
kept alive by designing men on both sides; when we bear these things
in mind, it is easy to see that it has required no little courage for
a Southern man, in the midst of Southern people, with their sentiments
and feelings, to take up the black man’s cause and advocate it in words
of bold, plain truth.
Dr. Haygood is the Christian, and not the politician. When he praises,
as he does without stint, the work accomplished for the Negro by the
people of the North, it is not the work of that particular politician,
with his promise of “a mule, forty acres, and provisions for a year,”
but of teachers, secular and religious, who, with a motive higher than
the personal, have sought the elevation, moral and intellectual, of
the Negro. He pleads no apology for his Southern brethren who have
met these benevolent workers with opposition, social ostracism, and
other forms of persecution, but utters his condemnation of this spirit
whenever and wherever manifested.
And the results of the first twenty years’ history have justified his
high and hopeful views. It is only two years since Senator Brown,
of Georgia, said of the Negro, in a speech delivered in the United
States Senate: “He has shown a capacity to receive education, and a
disposition to elevate himself that is exceedingly gratifying, not
only to me, but to every right-thinking Southern man.” The results
show that the Negro has a real hunger for the education he so greatly
needs. It is shown that in the year 1881, forty-seven per cent. of the
colored school population was enrolled as attending the public schools,
whilst in the same year there was enrolled fifty-two per cent. of the
white population. Though both figures are painfully low, and suggest a
condition of great illiteracy, yet, when we remember the past of the
Negro—how he has been trampled down and trodden under—the figure 47 at
the end of his first twenty years, is both encouraging and significant.
But Dr. Haygood finds his strongest hope in the religious nature of
the Negro. The religious element of the race was very manifest in the
days of slavery, and since its freedom still more so. The moral and
religious progress of twenty years is encouraging. Of seven millions,
the entire colored population, a million and a half are communicants of
the various churches. Whilst their notions are crude, their conceptions
of religious truth often painfully realistic and grotesque, yet their
religion is real and worthy of confidence. More than to all other
influences combined, to the black man’s religion is due the shaping of
his better character. It is from this basis, and working along this
line, that Dr. Haygood sees the success of the future. His closing word
at Chautauqua is a statement of the whole theory which will commend
itself to the sympathy and judgment of right-thinking Christian men
everywhere: “Mere statesmanship can not solve this hard problem. It
is not given to the wisdom of man; but God reigns, and God does not
fail. We are workers with him in his great designs. When we stand by
the cross of Jesus Christ we will know what to do. We can solve our
problem, God being our helper. But on no lower platform than this—the
platform of the Ten Commandments and of the Sermon on the Mount.”