THE SOUL OF JOHN BROWN
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THE SOUL OF
JOHN BROWN
BY
STEPHEN GRAHAM
New York
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
1920
_All Rights Reserved_
COPYRIGHT, 1920,
By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
Set up and electrotyped. Published October, 1920.
CONTENTS
Chapter Page
I Thoughts on Slavery 3
II In Virginia 22
III Orators and Actors, Preachers and Singers 70
IV In Tennessee 97
V Marching Through Georgia 119
VI Tramping to the Sea 152
VII After the War: the Vote 182
VIII In Alabama: Color and Color Prejudice 195
IX The Southern Point of View 211
X Exodus 232
XI In North Florida and New Orleans 240
XII The New Negro Mind 263
XIII Negro Leadership 282
XIV The World Aspect 291
XV Up the Mississippi 309
XVI At Vicksburg 328
The Negro slaves were released in 1863. They and their children number
twelve millions out of a total of a hundred millions of all races
blending in America. Where do the children of the slaves stand to-day?
I
THOUGHTS ON SLAVERY
Although Charles Lynch of Virginia used to suspend British farmers by
their thumbs until they cried out _Liberty for ever!_ and lynching
has continued ever since, America is nevertheless at bottom free,
or at least was intended to be so by the idealists and politicians
who brought her forth. America is a living reproof of Europe, and it
has been generally conceived of as a land where men should suffer
no encroachment upon their personal liberty, where they should reap
duly the fruits of their labors, where no man should sap their rugged
independence or infringe upon the sovereign equality of their social
rights, where government should be entirely by consent of the governed,
not handed down from above as from superior beings or masters, but
controlled from below, from the broad base of toiling humanity.
The first discoverers were plunderers and seekers after barbaric
gold and gems, but her real pioneers were God-fearing men who laid
the foundations of modern American civilization by honest work and a
boundless belief in the development of free democracy. The institution
of slavery was therefore the thing which in theory was most abhorrent
to the American mind. It is a curious anomaly that a very short while
after the Declaration of Independence the land from which America
separated became free of slavery, and the British flag pre-eminently
the flag of freedom. But America, freed though she had become from
political interference on the part of Britain, nevertheless inherited
Negro slavery; and the economic prosperity of at least one-half of the
country was founded on the most hideous bondage in world history. Those
who had fled Europe to escape tyrants had themselves, under force of
circumstances, become tyrants.
Not that anyone willed slavery in America or designed to have it.
It was an economic accident. It was in America before most of the
Americans. The first Negro slaves were brought up the James River in
Virginia before the _Mayflower_ arrived, and as Negro orators say
to-day, “If being a long while in this country makes a good American,
we are the best Americans that there are.” Slavery had grown to vast
proportions by the time of the war against Britain. New America in
1783, standing on the threshold of the modern era, inherited a most
terrible burden in her millions of slaves. It was a burden that was
growing into the live flesh of America, and no one dared face at that
time the problem of getting free of it.
The actual American people as a whole were little responsible for
the institution of slavery. The pioneers hated and feared it. The
planters always condemned it in theory, and after the Emancipation of
1863 no one of any sense in the South has ever wished it back. Even
in those States where slavery took deepest root and showed its worst
characteristics, there was throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries a persistent resistance on the part of the colonists against
having black servile labor introduced.
To cite one colony as in a way characteristic of the whole attitude
of the colonists toward slavery, Georgia might be taken. Georgia was
originally an asylum for the bad boys of too respectable British
families and for discharged convicts and hopeless drunkards. Royal
charter guaranteed freedom of religion (except to Papists); an embargo
was placed on West Indian trade, so as to stop the inflow of rum; and
Negro slavery was forbidden. All for the good of reprobates making a
fresh start!
Invalids and merchants settled on the coast and made the society of
Savannah. The bad boys proved to be too poor stuff with which to
found a colony, and a special body of a hundred and thirty frugal
and industrious Scots and a hundred and seventy carefully chosen
Germans were brought in. Real work in Georgia commenced at Ebenezer,
on the Savannah River, and at New Inverness. The merchants strove to
get slavery introduced; the Scots and the Germans strove to keep it
out. At Savannah every night polite society toasted “_The One Thing
Needful_”—Slavery. The common talk of the townsfolk was of the extra
prosperity that would come to Georgia if slaves were brought in, the
extra quantities of cotton, of rice, of timber, and all that middlemen
could re-sell. The ministers of religion actually preached in churches
in favor of an institution sanctioned by the Bible, and it was thought
that a service was done for Christ by bringing the black men out of
Africa, where they were somewhat inaccessible, and throwing them into
the bosom of the Christian family in America. But the Scots and the
Germans remonstrated against the permission of an evil shocking to
human nature and likely to prove in time not a blessing but a scourge.
Over in South Carolina slavery was in full possession, and the wealth
of the Carolinian merchants was a soreness to the lean traders of
Georgia. Cupidity prompted underhand means to achieve the desired end.
Slaves were imported on life lease from owners in South Carolina. One
could not purchase the freehold of a Negro’s liberty and energy, only a
ninety-nine years’ lease of it, as it were, but that sufficed. Freedom
fell, the charter was abrogated, and under the sway of a royal governor
the floodgates of slavery were opened wide. In due time Georgia became
one of the worst slave States of the South. It remains to this day
one of those where in any case the contemporary record of burning and
lynching is most lurid. It would not be unsafe to draw the conclusion
that the introduction of slavery did as much harm to the souls of the
original Germans, Scots, and English and their descendants as to the
Negroes themselves.
The settlers were, however, loath to employ slaves, and for some
years there was little change. It was the rich immigrants from South
Carolina and elsewhere who embarked on large enterprises of planting
with a labor basis of black slaves. The poor white laboring class
was gradually ruined by competition with slave labor. And then it
became generally understood that everyone had to employ slaves, and
it was unbecoming for a white man to toil with his hands. The poor
Whites were if anything more despised than the black slaves, and often
indeed actually despised, paradoxically enough, by the latter. In
some parts there sprang up bands of white gypsies and robbers called
“pinelanders,” who stole from Black and White alike, and lived by their
wits.
In Africa the Negro tribes strove with one another in savagery, and
sold their prisoners to the Negro traders or White agents, who dragged
them to the coast. There they were herded in the holds of noisome
slaving vessels, indiscriminately, nakedly, fortuitously, the violent
ones tied up or chained, the gentler ones unloosed. None knew whither
they were going, and even those victorious tribes who sold them to
the white man knew nothing of the destination of the victims they
thus despatched. Hundreds of thousands, nay, millions of tribesmen
of all kinds and shades of black and brown were thus exported to the
Indies and the Colonies and sold into bondage to the civilized world.
Arrived in America, the slaves were sold to merchants or auctioned as
common cattle and sent up country to work. A healthy male slave of
good dimensions and in his prime would fetch a thousand dollars and
young women eight hundred dollars, and fair-sized girls five hundred.
Olmsted gives a price list which was handed him by a dealer; that
was in 1853.[1] In earlier years the price was considerably less,
and always varied according to the demand. The raw, first-come Negro
slaves were not sold as retinue for the rich, but as colonial utilities
to be worked like cattle on the farms and plantations. Cotton was
the staple, and in thinking of the time the eye must range over a
vast expanse of cotton plantations and see all the main work done by
Negro gangs of men and women in charge of slave drivers. As Olmsted
describes a gang of women in a characteristic passage—“The overseer
rode about them on a horse, carrying in his hand a rawhide whip ... but
as often as he visited one end of the line the hands at the other end
would discontinue their labor until he turned to them again. Clumsy,
awkward, gross, elephantine in all their movements; pouting, grinning,
and leering at us; sly, sensual, and shameless in all their expression
and demeanor; I never before had witnessed, I thought, anything more
revolting....” In 1837 the whole of Georgia, and indeed of the South,
was worked by black slaves—the poor white labor (chiefly Irish) had
diminished almost to disappearance. Slave labor was founded on slave
discipline, and the discipline on punishment. There was no particular
readiness on the part of the savages to do the work given them or
understand what they had to do. Whether they could have been coaxed or
persuaded is problematical. Farmers have not the time or the spirit for
coaxing. The quickest way was by inspiring terror or inflicting pain.
It might have been different if the Negro could have been given any
positive incentive to work, but there was none. He had therefore to be
flogged to it. The smallest gang had its driver with his whip. The type
who to-day has become politely a “speeder up” was then the man with the
whip. He could have had more power by using his whip infrequently and
on the most stubborn slaves, but that was not the common man’s way. He
flogged hard and he flogged often. On a typical Georgian plantation
the field driver had power to inflict twelve lashes there and then
when trouble occurred. The head driver could give thirty-six and the
overseer fifty. Every morning there would be a dozen or so special
floggings by the overseer or his assistant at the office. Women if
anything fared worse than men. On the slightest provocation their
scanty clothes were thrown over their heads and they were subjected to
a beating. Naked boys and girls were tied by their wrists to boughs
of trees so that their toes barely touched the ground, and lashed.
The overseer did it, the owner’s son did it, upon occasion the owner
himself did it.
There were pleasant exceptional homes in Virginia and the Carolinas and
elsewhere where there was no flogging and no cruelty whatsoever, but
instead a great mutual affection. Slavery may have been wrong there
also, or it may have been justifiable. But it was not on account of
the happy slaves that John Brown sallied forth at Harper’s Ferry, but
because of the many unhappy ones. As the whole intensity of the Negro
trouble is centered in the evils of the institution of slavery, it is
necessarily on these that one must insist, though the exceptions be not
lost sight of.
It is often said that the slaves were seldom hurt because, since they
were property, it behooved a master to take care of them and preserve
them. But that is fallacious. Men got pleasure out of beating their
slaves as they get pleasure out of chewing tobacco, drinking spirits,
and using bad language. It grew on them; they liked it more and more.
In many cases no proficiency or industry could save the slaves from a
flogging. And, besides that, there was current in Georgia and all the
more commercial parts a theory that it was most profitable to use up
your slaves every seven years and then re-stock.
Slaves of course were bred, and it is conceivable that it might have
been generally more profitable to have a breeding farm of Negroes and
sell the children than work them off in seven years. But there was
little method in the minds of the planters. They tried to combine the
seven-years system and breeding at the same time. Every girl of sixteen
had children, every woman of thirty had grandchildren. But the women
were worked up to the last moment of pregnancy on the cotton fields
and sent back three weeks after delivery, and even flogged then. The
poor women lay on straw on earthen floors in their torments, moaning
in their agonies. When sent back to the fields too soon they suffered
horrible physical torment. They often appealed to their masters: “Me
make plenty nigger for massa, me useful nigger.” But more than half of
their offspring were allowed to die. The mother would have been worth
her keep as a mother, but, no, she must fill her place in the hoeing
line instead of looking after her children.
There were few genuine Negro families. All were herded or separated and
sold off in batches and re-herded with little or no regard to family
relationships, though these poor, dark-minded slaves did form the most
intimate and precious attachments. The slaves’ fervent hope was that
massa would marry and have children, so that when he died they would
not be sold up, but remain in the family.
Illegitimacy in sexual relationships raged. Almost every planter had
besides his own family a dusky brood of colored women. No likely
girl escaped the overseers. Poor whites and pinelanders broke into
black quarters and ravished where they would. There seemed little
squeamishness, and there was little enough effective resistance on the
part of black girls. The institution of slavery with its cruelties had
brutalized men’s minds. As for the Negro women, one can well understand
how little feminine shame would remain when the bare hips were so
commonly exposed and flogged.
“Oh, but don’t you know—did nobody ever tell or teach any of you that
it is a sin to live with men who are not your husbands?” asked Fanny
Kemble of a slave. The latter seized her vehemently by the wrist and
exclaimed:
“Oh, yes, missie, we know—we know all about dat well enough; but we do
anything to get our poor flesh some rest from the whip; when he make me
follow him into de bush, what use me tell him no? He have strength to
make me.”[2]
Probably the slave drivers and other white men obtained some sensual
gratification from flogging women. Brutality of this kind is often
associated with sexual perversity. The taking of Negro women showed
a will toward the animal and was an act of greater depravity than
ordinary deflections from the straight and moral way. Not that there
was not pride in pale babies and even a readiness on the part of some
Negresses to give themselves to white men. As a plantation song said:
“Twenty-four black girls can’t make one mulatto baby by themselves.”
By flogging and rape and inhuman callousness did the white South
express its reaction to black slavery. There were also burnings,
demoniacal tortures, flogging to death, and every imaginable human
horror. It may well be asked: _How came it about that those who
protested so high-mindedly about the introduction of slavery did not
use the slaves kindly and humanly when they were forced to have them?_
The answer I think lies in the fact that no man is good enough to have
complete control over any other man. No man can be trusted. Give your
best friend or neighbor power over you, and you’ll be surprised at the
use he will make of it. Even wives and children in this respect are not
safe in the hands of their husbands and parents if they are understood
as possessions. “She belongs to me and I’ll kill her,” Gorky makes a
drunken cobbler say. “Ah, no, she does not belong to you; she is a
woman, and a woman belongs to God,” says the Russian friend.
There is indeed little more terrifying in human experience than the
situation which occurs when one human being is entirely in the power of
another, when the prisoner in the dungeon confronts his torturer, when
the unprotected girl falls completely into the power of a man, when
Shylock has Antonio delivered to him, and so forth.
Cruelty can be awakened in almost any man and woman—it can be
developed. A taste for cruelty is like a taste for drink or sexual
desire or drugs. It is a lust. It is indeed one of the worst of the
lusts. One can forgive or excuse a man the other lusts, but cruelty one
cannot—and indeed does not wish to forgive or excuse. Yet how readily
does it develop.
The incredible story is told of a young girl lashed by the overseer,
threatened with burning. She runs away. It is a gala day on the
plantation. The white men hunt her to the swamps with bloodhounds and
she is torn to bits before their eyes. They love the spectacle of
terror even more than the spectacle of pain. The Negro, of nervous,
excitable nature, is marked out by destiny to be a butt for cruelty. It
is so to-day, long after emancipation; the Negro, in whom hysterical
fear can be awakened, is the most likely to be lynched or chased by
the mob or slowly burned for its delight. More terrible than the act
of cruelty is the state of mind of those who can look on at it and
gloat over it. After all, a lynching is often roughly excusable. A man
commits a heinous crime against a woman, scandalizing the community,
and the community takes the law into its own hands. The rightness of
the action can be argued. But what of the state of heart of a mob of
a thousand, watching a Negro burning to death, listening happily to
his yells and crying out to “make him die slow”? It is an appalling
revelation of the devil in man.
And despite the fact that such cruelty agonizes the mind of the
tender-hearted and sympathetic, we must remain tolerant in judgment.
We must not tolerate intolerance; in all other respects we must be
tolerant.
Cruelty is in man. The planters did the natural thing with the slaves
who came into their power. The white South would slip into the same way
of life again to-day if slavery could be introduced. What is more, you
and I, and every man, unless he were of an exceptional nature, would
succumb to the system and disgrace ourselves with similar cruelty. A
demon not altogether banished still lurks in most of us and can easily
be brought back. Lust lives on lust and grows stronger; and cruelty,
like other cravings, is a desire of the flesh, and can easily become
devouring habit. We are greater brutes after we have committed an act
of cruelty or lust than we were before we committed it, and we are made
ready to commit more or worse.
Concomitant with cruelty is callousness. An indifference which is less
than usual human carelessness sets in with regard to creatures on whom
we have satisfied our lusts. Flogging makes a heavy flogged type of
human being who looks as if he had always needed flogging. It ceases
to be piquant to flog him. The old Negress with brutish human lusts
written all over her body is not even horrible or repulsive, _elle
n’existe plus_. The old, worn-out drudge lies down to die in the dirty
straw, the flies gathering about his mouth, and expires without one
Christian solace or one Christian sympathy. Though ministers waxed
eloquent on the Christian advantages to the Blacks of being brought
from pagan Africa to Christian America, there quickly sets in the
belief that after all Negroes are like animals and have no souls to
save.
This callousness showed worst in the selling of slaves, the separating
of black husband and wife, parents and children, family and family,
with the indifference with which a herdsman separates and detaches
sheep from his flock. This, despite the manifest passionate tenderness
and attachment of slave to slave, and even upon occasion slave to
master and home.
The state of the slaves grew most forlorn, forsaken of man, unknown to
God. A prison twilight eclipsed the light of the sun-flooded Southland.
A consciousness of a sad, sad fate was begotten among the slaves. All
the tribes of the Negroes became one in a community of suffering.
And gradually they ceased to be mere savages. They grew to something
higher—through suffering. It was a penal offense for many a long year
even to preach Christ to them. Slaves were beaten when it was found
out that they had been baptized. But before the Blacks were brought
to Christ they must have got a great deal nearer Him than had their
masters. It was illegal to teach a slave to read and write. But the
Negroes in a mysterious way learned the white man’s code and secretly
obtained his Bible and plunged into the Old Testament and the New.
The white man rightly feared that the spread of education among the
slaves would endanger the institution. They spoke of slavery as _the_
institution as if it were the only one in the world. They also feared
the spread of Christian teaching.
As it happened, the Negro soul was very thirsty for religion and drank
very deeply of the wells of God. The Negroes learned to sing together,
thus first of all expressing corporate life. They drew from the story
of Israel’s sufferings a token of their own life, and they formed their
scarcely articulate hymns—which survive to-day as the only folklore
music of America.
Go down, Moses,
Way down in Egyp’ lan’.
Tell ole Pharaoh
Le’ ma people go!
Israel was in Egyp’ lan’,
Oppres’ so hard dey could not stan’.
Le’ ma people go!
or the infinitely pathetic and beautiful
In the valley
On my knees
With my burden
An’ my Saviour
I couldn’t hear nobody pray, O Lord,
Couldn’t hear nobody pray.
O—way down yonder
By myself
I couldn’t hear nobody pray.
Chilly waters
In the Jordan,
Crossing over
Into Canaan,
I couldn’t hear nobody pray, O Lord,
Couldn’t hear nobody pray.
O—way down yonder by myself
I couldn’t hear nobody pray.
Hallelujah!
Troubles over
In the Kingdom
With my Jesus.
I couldn’t hear nobody pray, O Lord,
Couldn’t hear nobody pray.
O—way down yonder
By myself
I couldn’t hear nobody pray.
The poor slave was very much—way down yonder by himself, and he
couldn’t hear nobody pray. Jesus seemed to have been specially born
for him—to love his soul when none other was ready to love it, to
comfort him in all his sufferings, and to promise him that happy heaven
where unabashed the old woolly-head can sit by Mary and “play with the
darling Son,” as another “spiritual” expresses it.
The first Negro preachers and evangelists had the inevitable
persecution, and as inevitably the persecution failed. The North
grew very sympathetic, and Bibles grew as plentiful in the South as
dandelion blossoms. It became the unique lesson book of the Negro.
It alone fed his spiritual consciousness. He obtained at once an
appreciation of its worth to him that made it his greatest treasure,
his only offset against his bondage. He learned it by heart, and there
came to be a greater textual knowledge of the Bible among the Black
masses than among any other people in the world. It is so to-day,
though it is fading. The spiritual life of the Negro became as it were
an answering beacon to the fervor of the Abolitionists of the North,
most of whom were passionate Christians of Puritan type.
The South grew sulky, grew infinitely suspicious and restive, and
irritated and fearful. It began to fear a general slaves’ rising. The
numerical superiority of the Negroes presented itself to the mind as
an ever-growing menace. The idea of emancipation was fraught with the
economic ruin it implied. It is difficult now to resurrect the mind of
society preceding the time of the great Civil War. It is the fashion
to emphasize the technical aspect of the quarrel of North and South,
and to say that the war was fought in order that the Union might be
preserved. But it is truer to say that it was fought because the South
wanted to secede. And the South wished to secede because it saw more
clearly every day that the institution of slavery was in danger. Every
month, every year, saw its special occasions of irritation, premonitory
splashing out of flame, petty explosions and threats. More slaves
escaped every year. The Underground Railway, so called, by which the
Friends succored the poor runaways and brought them out of danger and
distress into the sanctuary of the North grew to be better and better
organized. On the other hand, the punishments of discovered runaways
grew more barbarous and more public, and the rage of the North was
inflamed.
Heroic John Brown made his abortive bid to light up a slaves’
insurrection by his wild exploit of Harper’s Ferry. And then John
Brown, old man as he was, of apostolic aspect and fervor, was tried and
condemned. He did not fear to die. But he wrote to his children that
they should “abhor _with undying hatred_ that sum of all villainies,
slavery,” and while he was being led to the gallows he handed to a
bystander his last words and testament—
I, John Brown, am now quite _certain_ that the crimes of this _guilty
land_ will never be purged away but with blood. I had _as I now think
vainly_ flattered myself that without _very much_ bloodshed it might
be done....
And in his ill-fitting suit and trousers and loose carpet slippers John
Brown was hanged silently and solemnly, and all the troops watching
him, even stern Stonewall Jackson himself, were stricken with a sort of
premonitory terror. Soon came the great war.
And the slaves were made free. That is their story. Where do they stand
to-day?
II
IN VIRGINIA
By the abolition of slavery mankind threw off a great evil. The slave
owner escaped as well as the slave. For, although our human sympathy
goes more readily to the slaves themselves, it is nevertheless true
that it was as bad for the spirit and character of the owners as for
those of their chattels. To-day in America, and especially in the
South, there is a hereditary taint in the mind derived from slavery and
it is to be observed in the descendants of the masters as much as in
the descendants of the slaves. It would be a mistake to think of this
American problem as exclusively a Negro problem. It is as necessary to
study the white people as the black. The children of the owners and the
overseers and the slave drivers are not the same as the children of
families where no slaves were ever owned. Mastery of men and power over
men have been bred in their blood. That in part explains the character
of that section of the United States where slaves were most owned, and
the brutality, cruelty, and sensuality which upon occasion disfigure
the face of society in 1920. The old dead self leers out with strange
visage from the new self, which wishes to be different.
If you see a white man in New Orleans rolling his quid and spitting
out foul brutality against “niggers,” you will often find that his
father was a driver on a plantation. Or if in that abnormal way so
characteristic of the South you hear foul sexual talk about the
Negroes rolling forth from a lowbrow in Vicksburg, it is fairly likely
that he is full of strange black lust himself, and that his father
and grandfather perchance assaulted promiscuously Negro women and
contributed to the writing of racial shame in the vast bastardy of the
South. If you hear a man urging that the Negro is not a human being,
but an animal, you will often find that he himself is nearer to the
animal. His fathers before him held that the Negroes were animals
and not humans. And, believing them animals, they yet sinned with
the animals, and so brought themselves down to animal level. You see
a crowd of white men near Savannah. They are mostly proud of their
English origin. Yet they are going to burn a Negro alive for killing a
sheriff. How is it possible in this century? It is possible because it
is in the blood of the children. They crave to see Uncle Tom’s flesh
crackling in the flames and hear his hysterical howls. Their fathers
did. Their children’s children will do the same unless it is stamped
out by the will of society as a whole.
Of course the inheritance of evil is not the same in all classes of
society. Everyone inherits something from the baleful institution,
but not everyone the same. The mind of the coarse White is crude
and terrible, and the mind of the refined is certainly different.
One should perhaps be more lenient to the poor, and more urgent in
criticism of the rich. For all stand together, and the disease is one
not merely of individuals, but of the whole. The rich and cultured
condone the brutality of the masses because they have a point of view
which is incompatible with theirs.
Those whose ancestors treated the slaves well, claim to be immune from
all criticism. There were in the old days many kind and considerate
masters to whom the Negroes were wonderfully attached. But even these
masters suffered from the institution of slavery, as any rich man
suffers from dependence on retainers and flunkeys and servants whom
he practically owns, as all suffer who are divorced from the reality
of earning their living as equals with their neighbors. And their
children, brought up amidst the submissive servility of the Negroes,
grew to be little monarchs or chiefs, and always to expect other people
to do things for them. Where ordinary white children learn to ask and
say “please,” they learned to order and command and to threaten with
punishment. The firm lip of the educated Southerner has an expression
which is entirely military. In the army, one asks for nothing of
inferiors except courage on the day of battle. All is ordered. And the
power to order and to be obeyed rapidly changes the expression of the
features. It has changed the physiognomy of the aristocracy in the
Southern section of the United States. You can classify all faces into
those who say “please” and those who do not, and the children of the
slave owners are mostly in the second category. Unqualified mastership;
indifference to dirt and misery in the servant class; callous disregard
of others’ pain, or pleasure taken in their pain; slaves said to be
animals and not human beings, and the superadded sin of bestiality,
using a lower caste to satiate coarse lusts which the upper caste could
not satisfy; the buying and selling of creatures who could otherwise
only belong to God—all these terrible sins or sinful conditions are
visited on the third and fourth generation of those who hate, though
as must always be said, God’s mercy is shown to thousands of them that
love Him and keep His eternal commandments.
The children of the slaves also inherit evil from their slavery. The
worst of these are resentment and a desire for revenge. Doubtless,
slavery sensualized the Negro. He was the passive receptacle for
the white man’s lusts. Most of the Negroes arrived in America more
morally pure than they are to-day. As savages, they were nearer to
nature. Mentally and spiritually they are much higher now, but they
have learned more about sin, and sin is written in most of their
bodies. It is sharpest in the mulattoes and “near whites”—those
whose ancestors were longest in slavery have the worst marks of it
in them. The state of the last slaves to be imported into America is
much simpler and happier than the rest. The moral character of the
black Negroes is also simpler than that of the pallid ones. But this
is anticipating my story. I set off to study the ex-slave because the
civilized world is threatened by what may be called a vast slaves’
war. In Russia the grandchildren of the serfs have overthrown those
who were once their masters, and have taken possession of the land and
the state; in Germany Spartacus has arisen to overthrow the military
slavery of Prussianism; and the wage slaves are rising in every land.
There is a vast resentment of lower orders against upper orders, of
the proletarians, who have nothing and are nothing, against those who
through inheritance or achievement have reached the ruling class. The
Negroes are in no way to be compared to the Russians in intellectual
or spiritual capacity: they are racially so much more undeveloped.
Much less divided Russian serf from Russian master than slave from
planter. But it is just because the contrast between the American white
man and American black man is so sharp and the quarrel so elemental
in character that it has seemed worth while to explore the American
situation. And if the struggle is more elemental, it can hardly be said
that there is not more at stake. American industrialism is ravaged by
waves of violent revolutionary ferment. If ill-treatment of the Blacks
should at last force the twelve millions of them to make common cause
with a revolutionary mob, polite America might be overwhelmed and the
larger portion of the world be lost—if not of the world, at least of
that world we call civilization.
What, then, of the Negro? What is he doing, what does he look like,
what does he feel to-day? It is impossible to learn much from current
books, so, following the dictum: “What is remarkable, learn to look at
it with your own eyes,” I went to America to see.
I chose Olmsted as my model. In 1853 Olmsted made a famous journey
through the seaboard States, holding up his mirror to the life of
the South in slavery days. The book which records his impressions
and reflections is one of the most valuable in American literature.
This great student of nature went methodically through Virginia, the
Carolinas and Georgia, Alabama and Louisiana. A pilgrimage not unlike
his has to be repeated to-day to ascertain how the ex-slave is, what
he is doing, how the experiment of his liberation has prospered, and
what is his future in the American Commonwealth. But as America is
so much more developed in 1920, and more problematical in the varied
fields of her national life, it has been necessary to make a broader,
if more rapid, survey of the whole South. I made the following journey
in America: I went slowly south from New York to Trenton, Philadelphia,
Baltimore, and Washington, staying some days at each and seeing America
grow darker as it visibly does when you watch faces from trolley car
windows going from town to town southward. I was on South Street, in
Philadelphia; watched the well-paid artisans and laborers at the docks
of Baltimore, visited there the polite homes of the colored working
class, cleaner, richer, cozier than that of the average British workman
on Tyneside or London Docks. I climbed the Lincoln Heights to talk to
Nanny Burroughs and see her good training college for colored women
there; was at Howard University and talked with black and gentle
Professor Miller and with the pale and intellectual Emmett Scott. I
sailed down the Potomac to Norfolk, Virginia, Uncle Sam’s great naval
base, going to be the greatest of its kind in the world; crossed to
Newport News and talked with black rivetters and chippers and others in
the shipbuilding yards; then, following the way of the first English
colonists and also the first Negro slaves, went up the James River to
Jamestown, and on to Richmond, the fine capital of the Old Dominion. I
traveled to Lynchburg and its tobacco industries, went from thence to
“sober” Knoxville, investigating the race riot there and the attitude
of Tennessee. From Knoxville I went to Chattanooga and Birmingham,
in each of which great steel centers I met the leading Negroes and
investigated conditions. I was at Atlanta, and walked across Georgia
to the sea, following Sherman. A three-hundred-mile walk through the
cotton fields and forests of Georgia was necessary in order to get a
broad section of the mass of the people. The impression left behind
by Sherman’s army which laid waste the country and freed all the
Negroes there gave also something of the historical atmosphere of the
South. From Savannah, which was the point on the sea to which General
Sherman attained, I went to Brunswick and Jacksonville, thence to
Pensacola, and on from Florida to New Orleans and the Gulf plantations.
I journeyed up the Mississippi on a river steamer, stayed at the Negro
city of Mound Bayou, was at Vicksburg and Greenville and Memphis, and
then repaired once more to the contrasting North.
Crossing the Mason-Dixon line was rather a magical and wonderful
event for me. After all, the North, with its mighty cities and
industrialized populations, is merely prose to one who comes from
England. Pennsylvania is a projection of Lancashire and Yorkshire, New
York is a projection of London, and massive Washington has something
of the oppressiveness of English park drives and Wellingtonias. But
southward one divines another and a better country. It has a glamour;
it lures. There the orange grows and there are palms; there is a hotter
sun and brighter flowers. Human beings there, one surmises, have a
more romantic disposition and warmer imagination. Reposing on the vast
feudalism of Negro labor there is a more stately way of living, life is
more spacious. And at the resorts on the coast of Florida and the Gulf
of Mexico a great number of people live for pleasure and happiness, and
not for business and ambition.
I journeyed on a white-painted steamer in the evening down the Potomac
to Old Point Comfort, leaving behind me the noise and glare of
Washington and the hustle of Northern American civilization. It was
the crossing of a frontier—without show of passports or examination
of trunks, the passing to a new country, with a different language and
different ways. The utter silence of the river was a great contrast
to the clangor of the streets of Philadelphia and Baltimore and the
string of towns I had been passing through on my way South. Sunset was
reflected deep in the stream, and mists crept over the surface of the
water. Then the moon silvered down on our course, my cabin window was
full open and the moon looked in. I lay in a capacious sort of cottage
bed and was enchanted by the idea of going to “Dixie,” of which we
had all sung so much; and the soft Southern airs and night and the
throbbing of the river steamer gliding over the placid water gave an
assurance of some new refreshment of spirit. With a quaint irrelevance
the whole British army, and indeed the nation, had been singing
“Dixie” songs throughout the war—“Just try to picture me, way down
in Tennessee” we were always asking of one another. Now, behold, the
war was over, and it might be possible to go there and forget a little
about all that sordid and tumultuous European quarrel.
All night the river whispered its name and lulled the boat to sleep.
Dawn on the broad serenity of the waters at Old Point Comfort was
utterly unlike the North, from which I had come, and the last ten days
of jangling trolley cars hustling along shoppy streets. A morning star
shone in the pale-blue sky, lighting as it were a vestal lamp over
the coast, and we looked upon Virginia. As the sun rose, vapor closed
in the scene. We made the port of Norfolk in a mist which seemed each
moment getting warmer. The chill winds of October were due in the
North, but Virginia was immune. During the week I spent in the city of
Norfolk and on Hampton Roads it did not get less than 85 in the shade,
even at night. The weather, however, was hotter than is usual even in
Eastern Virginia at that time of the year.
I obtained the impression of a great city rather cramped for want of
space, and in this I suppose I was right. By all accounts Norfolk has
trebled its population during the war, and needs to have its center
rebuilt spaciously and worthily. When Olmsted came through in 1853 he
records that Norfolk was a dirty, low, ill-arranged town, having no
lyceum or public library, no gardens, no art galleries, and though
possessing two “Bethels” having no “Seamen’s Home” and no place of
healthy amusement. He rather makes fun of a Lieutenant Maury, who in
those days was having a vision of the Norfolk of the future, and saw
it one of the greatest ports in the world, being midmost point of the
Atlantic coast and having an inner and an outer harbor with perfect
facilities of ingress and egress in all weathers.
To-day Lieutenant Maury’s vision has proved prophetic. In the maps of
the new America which is coming, Norfolk is destined to be printed
in ever larger letters. The war showed the way. The determination of
America to be worthily armed at sea made it certain, and the future
of Norfolk, with Hampton Roads and Newport News, is to be the primary
naval base of the Atlantic coast. The military and naval activities
of Norfolk during the war were very important. Eastern Virginia was
a great training ground, and Norfolk the main port of embarkation of
troops for Europe. Shipbuilding and naval construction also were in
full swing. Great numbers of laborers, especially Negroes, seem to have
been attracted. The number no doubt is exaggerated, but the colored
people there number themselves now at one hundred thousand. They
have been attracted by the high wages and the record of Norfolk for
immunity from mob violence. A lynching is not in anyone’s remembrance.
Trouble might have broken out during the war, but Norfolk possessed an
excellent “City Manager” who was always prepared.
On one occasion some five hundred sailors set out to “clean up colored
town,” but they were met by an adequate force of armed police and
marines and changed their minds. On the other hand, a mob of colored
crews and troops started an attack on the town jail, but a few armed
men quickly dispersed them.
I noticed at once that the Blacks of Norfolk were very much more black
than those of Washington or New York. Their hair was more matted.
Their eyes were more goggly. They were more odorous. When the black
chambermaid had been in my room for two minutes it was filled with a
pungent and sickening odor. The elevator reeked with this odor. It was
the characteristic smell of my first Southern hotel. I noticed it on
the trolley cars. It was wafted among the vegetables and fruit of the
city market. Indeed, the whole town had it. I grew used to it after a
while and was told by those who were liberal of mind that every race
had its smell. For instance, to certain tribes of Indians there was
said to be nothing so disgusting as the smell of a perfectly clean
white man. Even when a man who has a bath every day and a change into
perfectly fresh linen came into his presence, the Indian felt sick.
Negroes were supposed to notice the smell of white men, but were too
subservient or polite to remark upon it. There is, however, a good deal
of doubt about this point in human natural history. The smell that we
have is the smell of the animal in us, and not of the more human or
spiritual part of us. One knows the smell of the bear and the fox,
and that the wolf has a stronger smell than the dog, and the wild cat
than the domestic cat. Bloodhounds are said to follow the trail of the
Negro more readily than that of the white man, and it might reasonably
be argued that the terrible odor of the Blacks is due to their greater
proximity to an animal stage in development. Be that as it may, I
quite see that this odor is something which the Negro will have
difficulty in living down. I learned that he was very sensitive about
it, as about his kinky hair, and that the more educated and refined he
became the more he strove to get rid of these marks. That explained
to me why in all those happy streets of prosperous Baltimore at every
corner there was a “Beauty Parlor,” where specialists plied Mme.
Walker’s “Anti-Kink,” and why the prosperous Negro workingman demanded
a bathroom and hot water in his home. The reason why the Blacks seem
blacker in the South seems to be because they are segregated in “Jim
Crow” sections of the cars, and none of the black comes off on white
people, but is on the contrary intensified by the shadow of black looks.
The colored folk here, moreover, seemed to talk more in the way they
are supposed to talk, and are not mincing the American tongue, as in
the North. Outside my room one maid says: “You’s a fool, sister Ann.”
“Yas, sister Sue, dat’s ‘zackly what I am,” says the other, and laughs
and repeats it as if it were the greatest joke—“Dat’s ‘zackly what I
am.”
I went into the streets to seek the Rev. B——, a leading colored
preacher of Norfolk. I stood in wonderment before a whitewashed
chapel with large china-blue stained-glass windows luridly depicting
our Lord’s baptism and the opening of the heavens over the Jordan.
A grizzled old Negro in a cotton shirt stopped in front of me and
exclaimed insinuatingly, “You’s looking at cullud folks’ church; ain’t
it bewtiful?” I took the opportunity to ask for the Rev. B——. He led
me along and pointed up a flight of wooden steps to a sufficiently
handsome dwelling place.
Rev. B—— on seeing me had a gleam of doubt on his face for perhaps
one second, but only for a second. One instinctively felt that here
in Virginia, where the color line is sharply drawn, no white man
is likely to present himself on terms of equality to a black man
without the desire to patronize or some guile of some kind. It is
rare for any white man to call upon any educated black man, and very
rarely indeed that he comes to him in a straightforward, honest, and
sincere manner. So the Rev. B—— showed doubt for a moment, and then
suddenly, after a few words, his doubt vanished. In my subsequent
journeying and adventures it was always thus—doubt at first glance,
and then, rapidly, the awakening of implicit trust and confidence. I
personally found the Negroes nearly always friendly. Mr. B—— was a
sparely-colored, lean, intellectual young man, a capable white man
in a veil of dark skin. He was all but white. I looked at his webby
hands—what a pity, it seemed, that, being so near, he could not be
_altogether_. And yet I realized that in such men and women, no matter
how fair they be, the psyche is different. There is something intensely
and insolubly Negro in even the nearest of near whites.
Rev. B—— took me all over the city. He was evidently extremely well
known to the colored people, for our conversation was intertwined with
a ceaseless——
“How do, Revrun?”
“How do?”
He showed me his charmingly built church (not that with the china-blue
windows), contrived in graceful horseshoe style, with graduated,
sloping gallery, richly-stained windows, and a vast array of
red-cushioned seats. A black organist was discoursing upon the organ,
and a voluminous, dusky charwoman with large arms was cleaning and
dusting among the pews below.
There sat under Rev. B—— every Sunday a fair share of the quality
colored folk of Norfolk. “I am glad that you have come to me, because I
can show you an up-to-date and proper church,” said the pastor. “There
are nine or ten like this in Norfolk, but when a stranger asks to see
a Negro church he’s usually taken to some out-of-the-way tabernacle
of the Holy Folks or some queer sect where everyone is shouting
Hallelujah, and it all seems very funny. But if you’ll come to me on
Sunday morning you’ll hear a service which for dignity and spiritual
comeliness will compare with any white man’s service in any part of the
world. You mustn’t think of us as still cotton pickers and minstrels
and nothing more. There is a great deal of Negro wealth and refinement
in this city of Norfolk.”
“How do you get on with white ministers?” I asked. “Do you work
together?”
“Oh, white ministers do not recognize black ones on the street,” said
he. “My neighbor, for instance, knows me well enough at the Baptist
Conference, and by his talk I see he knows all about my church. But
here in the city he cannot afford to know me. Yet he has not half so
many worshippers at his church, nor do they pay him half the salary
which my people pay me. He dare not spend on his clothes what I spend;
he has not such a well-appointed home. Yet if we meet on the street—he
doesn’t know me.”
This was evidently a sore point.