BEFORE EMANCIPATION AND AFTER.
First Importation of Negro Slaves into America--The Original
Abolitionists--A Colored Enthusiast and a Coward--Origin of the word
"Secession"--John Brown's Fanaticism--Uncle Tom's Cabin--Faithful unto
Death--George Augustus Sala on the Negro who Lingered too long in the
Mill Pond.
The American negro is such a distinct character that he cannot be
overlooked in a work of this nature. Some people think he is wholly bad,
and that although he occasionally assumes a virtue, he is but playing a
part, and playing it but indifferently well at that. Others place him on
a lofty pedestal, and magnify him into a hero and a martyr.
But the Afro-American, commonly called a "nigger" in the South, is
neither the one nor the other. He is often as worthless as the "white
trash" he so scornfully despises, and he is often all that the most
exacting could expect, when his surroundings and disadvantages are taken
into consideration. Physiologists tell us that man is very largely what
others make him, many going so far as to say that character and
disposition are three parts hereditary and one part environment. If this
is so, a good deal of allowance should be made. It is less than 300
years since the first negroes were brought over to this country, and it
is but little more than thirty years since slavery was abolished. Hence,
from both the standpoints of descent and environment, the negro is at a
great disadvantage, and he should hardly be judged by the common
standard.
It was in the year 1619 that a Dutch ship landed a cargo of negroes from
Guinea, but that was not really the first case of slavery in this
country. Prior to that time paupers and criminals from the old world had
voluntarily sold themselves into a species of subjection, in preference
to starvation and detention in their own land; but this landing in 1619
seems to have really introduced the colored man into the labor world and
market of America.
We need not trace the history of the negro as a slave at any length.
That he was occasionally abused goes without saying, but that his
condition was approximately as bad as a majority of writers have
attempted to prove is not so certain. It was the policy of the slave
owner to get as much work out of his staff as he possibly could. He knew
from experience that the powers of human endurance were necessarily
limited, and that a man could not work satisfactorily when he was sick
or hungry. Hence, even on the supposition that all slave owners were
without feeling, it is obvious that self-interest must have impelled
them to keep the negro in good health, and to prevent him from losing
strength from hardship and want.
On some plantations the lot of the slave was a hard one, but on others
there was very little complaining or cause for complaint. Thousands of
slaves were better off by far than they have been subsequent to
liberation, and it is a fact that speaks volumes for the much discussed
and criticized slaveholders, that numbers of emancipated slaves refused
to accept their freedom, while many more, who went away delighted at the
removal of withstraint, came back of their own option very soon after,
and begged to be allowed to resume the old relations.
The average negro obeys, literally obeys, the divine instruction to take
no thought for the morrow. If he has a good dinner in the oven he is apt
to forget for the time being that there is such a meal as supper, and he
certainly does not give even a passing thought to the fact that if he
has no breakfast in the morning he will be "powerfu' hungry." This
indifference as to the future robbed slavery of much of its hardship,
and although every one condemns the idea in the abstract, there are many
humane men and women who do not think the colored man suffered half as
much as has so often and so emphatically been stated.
Abolition was advocated with much earnestness for many years prior to
Lincoln's famous emancipation proclamation. The agitation first took
tangible shape during the administration of General Jackson, a man who
received more hero worship than has fallen to the lot of any of his
successors. To a zealous, if perhaps bigoted, Quaker belongs the credit
of having started the work, by founding a newspaper, which he called the
"Genius of Universal Emancipation." William Lloyd Garrison, subsequently
with "The Liberator," was connected with this journal, and in the first
issue he announced as his programme, war to the death against slavery in
every form. "I will not equivocate; I will not excuse; I will not
retreat a single inch, and I will be heard," was the announcement with
which he opened the campaign, which he subsequently carried on with more
conspicuous vigor than success.
Garrison handled the question of the relation between the white and
colored people of the country without gloves, and his very outspoken
language occasionally got him into trouble. The people who supported him
were known as Abolitionists, a name which even at that early date
conjured up hard feeling, and divided household against household, and
family against family. Among these Garrison was regarded as a hero, and
to some extent as a martyr, while the bitterness of his invective earned
for him the title of fanatic and crank from the thousands who disagreed
with him, and who thought he was advocating legislation in advance of
public sentiment.
The debates of the days of which we are speaking were full of interest.
Many of the arguments advanced teemed with force. The Abolitionists
denounced the Republic for inconsistency, in declaring that all men were
equal, and then keeping 3,000,000 colored people in enforced subjection.
In reply the Bible was freely quoted in defense of slavery, and the
fight was taken up by ministers of religion with much zeal. It was not,
by any means, a sectional question at that time. While the slaves were
owned by Southern planters and landed proprietors, they were purchased
and kept on borrowed capital, and many of the men in the North, who were
supposed to sympathize with the Abolitionists, were as much interested
in the perpetuation of slavery as those who actually owned the slaves
themselves.
In the year 1831, a negro named Turner, supported by six desperate and
misguided fellow countrymen, started out on what they regarded as a
practical crusade against slavery. Turner professed to have seen visions
such as inspired Joan of Arc, and he proceeded to fulfill what he
regarded as his divine mission, in a very fanatical manner. First, the
white man who owned Turner was murdered, and then the band proceeded to
kill off all white men in sight or within convenient reach. Within two
days nearly fifty white men were destroyed by those avenging angels, as
they were called, and then the insurrection or crusade was terminated by
the organizing of a handful of white men who did not propose to be
sacrificed as had been their fellows.
Turner's bravery was great when there was no resistance, but he
recognized that discretion was the better part of valor the moment
organized resistance was offered. Taking to the woods, he left his
followers to shift for themselves. For more than a week he lived on what
he could find in the wheat fields, and then, coming in contact with an
armed white man, he speedily surrendered. A week later he was hanged,
and seventeen other colored men suffered a like penalty for connection
with the conspiracy. The murderous outbreak had other dire results for
the negro, and caused many innocent men to be suspected and punished.
A year later, Garrison started the New England Anti-Slavery Society,
which was followed by many similar organizations. So intense did the
feeling become that President Jackson thought it advisable to recommend
legislation excluding Abolition literature from the mails. The measure
was finally defeated, but in the Southern States, particularly, a great
deal of mail was searched and even condemned. Rewards were offered in
some of the slave-holding States for the apprehension of some of the
leading Abolitionists, and feeling ran very high, every outbreak being
laid at the doors of the men who were preaching the new gospel of equal
rights, regardless of color.
Mobs frequently took a hand in the proceedings, and several men were
attacked and arrested on very flimsy pretexts. In 1836, the Pennsylvania
Hall, in Philadelphia, was burned, because it had been dedicated by an
anti-slavery meeting. So bitter did the feeling become that every
attempt to open schools for colored children was followed by
disturbance, the teachers being driven away and the books destroyed.
Numerous petitions on the subject were sent to Congress, and there was
an uproar in the House when it was proposed to refer a petition for the
abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia to a committee. The
Southern Congressmen withdrew from the House as a formal protest, and
the word "secession," which was subsequently to acquire such a much more
significant meaning, was first applied to this action on their part.
A compromise, however, was effected, and the seceding members took their
seats on the following day. Feeling, however, ran very high. Some people
returned fugitive slaves to their owners, while others established what
was then known as the underground railway. This was a combination
between Abolitionists in various parts, and involved the feeding and
housing of slaves, who were passed on from house to house and helped on
their road to Canada. Much excitement was caused in 1841 by the ship
"Creole," which sailed from Richmond with a cargo of 135 slaves from the
Virginia plantation. Near the Bahama Islands one of the slaves named
Washington, as by the way a good many thousand slaves were named from
time to time, headed a rebellion. The slaves succeeded in overpowering
the crew and in confining the captain and the white passengers. They
forced the captain to take the boat to New Providence, where all except
the actual members of the rebelling crowd were declared free.
Joshua Giddings, of Ohio, offered a resolution in the House of
Representatives claiming that every man who had been a slave in the
United States was free the moment he crossed the boundary of some other
country. The way in which this resolution was received led to the
resignation of Mr. Giddings. He offered himself for re-election, and was
sent back to Congress by an enormous majority. As Ohio had been very
bitter in its anti-negro demonstrations, the vote was regarded as very
significant. The Supreme Court decided differently from the people, and
a ruling was handed down to the effect that fugitive slaves were liable
to re-capture. The court held that the law as to slavery was paramount
in free as well as slave States, and that every law-abiding citizen must
recognize these rights and not interfere with them. Feeling became very
intense after this, and for a time it threatened to extend far beyond
rational limits. In the church the controversy waxed warm, and in more
than one instance division as well as dissension arose.
In 1858, a new phase was given to the controversy by John Brown. Every
one has heard of this remarkable man, who was regarded by some as a
martyr, and by others as a dangerous crank. As one writer very aptly
puts it, John Brown was both the one and the other. That his intentions
were in the main good, few doubt, but his methods were open to the
gravest censure, and according to some deep thinkers he was, in a large
degree, responsible for the bitter feeling which made war between the
North and the South inevitable. Probably this is giving undue importance
to this much-discussed enthusiast, who regarded himself as a divine
messenger sent to liberate the slaves and punish the slave-holders.
He conceived the idea of rallying all the colored people around him in
the impregnable mountains of Virginia, and having drafted a
constitution, he proceeded to unfurl his flag and call out his
supporters. In October, 1859, he took possession of the United States
Armory at Harper's Ferry, interfered with the running of trains, and
practically held the town with a force of some eighteen men, of whom
four were colored. Colonel Robert E. Lee quickly came on the scene with
a detachment of troops and drove the Brown following into an
engine-house. They declined to surrender, and thirteen were either
killed or mortally wounded. Two of Brown's sons were among those who
fell, and the leader himself was captured. He treated his trial with the
utmost indifference, and went to the scaffold erect and apparently
unconcerned. His body was taken to his old home in New York State, where
it was buried.
Abraham Lincoln must not be included in the list of enthusiastic
Abolitionists, although he eventually freed the slaves. In speeches made
prior to the war he expressed the opinion that in slave States general
emancipation would be ill-advised, and although his election was looked
upon as dangerous to slave-holders' interests, the fear seems to have
been prophetic in a large measure. It was not until the war had lasted
far longer than originally anticipated that Lincoln definitely
threatened to liberate the colored slaves. That threat he carried into
execution on January 1st, 1863, when 3,000,000 slaves became free. The
cause of the Confederacy had not yet become the "lost cause," and the
leaders on the Southern side were inclined to ridicule the decree, and
to regard it rather as a "bluff" than anything of a serious order. But
it was emancipation in fact as well as in deed, as the colored orator
never tired of explaining.
Such in outline is the history of the colored man during the days of
enforced servitude. Of his condition during that period volumes have
been written. Few works printed in the English language have been more
widely circulated than "Uncle Tom's Cabin," which has been read in every
English-speaking country in the world, and in many other countries
besides. It has been dramatized and performed upon thousands of stages
before audiences of every rank and class. As a descriptive work it
rivals in many passages the very best ever written. Much controversy has
taken place as to how much of the book is history--how much of it is
founded upon fact and how much is pure fiction. The ground is a rather
dangerous one to touch. It is safest to say that while the brutality
held up to scorn and contempt in this book was not general in the slave
States or on plantations in the South, what is depicted might have taken
place under existing laws, and the book exposed iniquities which were
certainly perpetrated in isolated cases.
That all negroes were not treated badly, or that slavery invariably
meant misery, can be easily proved by any one who takes the trouble to
investigate, even in the most superficial manner. When the news of
emancipation gradually spread through the remote regions of the South,
there were hundreds and probably thousands of negroes who declined
absolutely to take advantage of the freedom given them. Many most
pathetic cases of devotion and love were made manifest. Even to-day
there are numbers of aged colored men and women who are remaining with
their old-time owners and declining to regard emancipation as logical or
reasonable.
Not long ago, a Northern writer while traveling through the South found
an aged negro, whom he approached with a view to getting some
interesting passages of local history. To his surprise he found that the
old man had but one idea. That idea was that it was his duty to take
care of and preserve his old master's grave. When the war broke out, the
old hero was the body-servant or valet of a man, who, from the very
first, was in the thick of the fight against the North. The colored man
followed his soldier-master from place to place, and when a Northern
bullet put an end to the career of the master, the servant reverently
conveyed the body back to the old home, superintended the interment, and
commenced a daily routine of watching, which for more than thirty years
he had never varied.
All the relatives of the deceased had left the neighborhood years
before, and the faithful old negro was the only one left to watch over
the grave and keep the flowers that were growing on it in good
condition. As far as could be learned from local gossip, the old fellow
had no visible means of subsistence, securing what little he needed to
eat in exchange for odd jobs around neighboring houses. No one seemed to
know where he slept, or seemed to regard the matter as of any
consequence. There was about the jet black hero, however, an air of
absolute happiness, added to an obvious sense of pride at the
performance of his self-imposed and very loving task.
Instances of this kind could be multiplied almost without end. The negro
as a free man and citizen retains many of the most prominent
characteristics which marked his career in the days before the war. Now
and again one hears of a negro committing suicide. Such an event,
however, is almost as rare as resignation of an office-holder or the
death of an annuitant. Indifference to suffering and a keen appreciation
of pleasure, make prolonged grief very unusual among Afro-Americans, and
in consequence their lives are comparatively joyous.
One has to go down South to appreciate the colored man as he really is.
In the North he is apt to imitate the white man so much that he loses
his unique personality. In the Southern States, however, he can be found
in all his original glory. Here he can be regarded as a survival of
preceding generations. In the South, before the war, the truism that
there is dignity in toil was scarcely appreciated at its full worth. The
negro understood, as if by instinct, that he ought to work for his white
master, and that duties of every kind in the field, on the road and in
the house, should be performed by him. For a white man who worked he
entertained feelings in which there was a little pity and a great deal
of contempt. He has never got over this feeling, or the feeling which
his father before him had. Down South to-day the expression "po' white
trash" is still full of meaning, and the words are uttered by the
thick-lipped, woolly-headed critics with an emphasis and expression the
very best white mimic has never yet succeeded in reproducing.
George Augustus Sala, one of England's oldest and most successful
descriptive writers, talks very entertainingly regarding the emancipated
slave. The first trip made to this country by the versatile writer
referred to was during the war.
He returned home full of prejudices, and wrote up the country in that
supercilious manner European writers are too apt to adopt in regard to
America. Several years later he made his second trip, and his
experiences, as recorded in "America Revisited," are much better
reading, and much freer from prejudice.
"For full five and thirty years," he writes, "had I been waiting to see
the negro 'standing in the mill pond.' I saw him in all his glory and
all his driving wretchedness at Guinneys, in the State of Virginia. I
own that for some days past the potential African, 'standin' in de mill
pond longer than he oughter' had been lying somewhat heavily on my
conscience. My acquaintance with our dark brethren since arriving in
this country had not only been necessarily limited, but scarcely of a
nature to give me any practical insight into his real condition since he
has been a free man--free to work or starve; free to become a good
citizen or go to the devil, as he has gone, mundanely speaking, in Hayti
and elsewhere. Colored folks are few and far between in New York, and
they have never, as a rule, been slaves, and are not even generally of
servile extraction. In Philadelphia they are much more numerous. Many of
the mulatto waiters employed in the hotels are strikingly handsome men,
and on the whole the sable sons of Pennsylvania struck me as being
industrious, well dressed, prosperous, and a trifle haughty in their
intercourse with white folks.
"In Baltimore, where slavery existed until the promulgation of Lincoln's
proclamation, the colored people are plentiful. I met a good many
ragged, shiftless, and generally dejected negroes of both sexes, who
appeared to be just the kind of waifs and strays who would stand in a
mill pond longer than they ought to in the event of there being any
convenient mill pond at hand. But the better class darkeys, who have
been domestic slaves in Baltimore families, seemed to retain all their
own affectionate obsequiousness of manner and respectful familiarity.
Again, in Washington, the black man and his congeners seemed to be doing
remarkably well. At one of the quietest, most elegant and most
comfortable hotels in the Federal Capital, I found the establishment
conducted by a colored man, all of whose employes, from the clerks in
the office to the waiters and chambermaids, were colored. Our
chambermaid was a delightful old lady, and insisted ere we left that we
should give her a receipt for a real old English Christmas plum pudding.
"But these were not the mill pond folk of whom I was in quest. They were
of the South, as an Irishman in London is of Ireland, but not in it. I
had a craving to see whether any of the social ashes of slavery lived
their wonted fires. Away down South was the real object of my mission,
and in pursuit of that mission I went on to Richmond."
Mr. Sala proceeds to give a most amusing account of his ride from New
York to Richmond, with various criticisms of sleeping-car accommodation,
heartily endorsed by all American travelers who have read them. Arriving
at Richmond he asked the usual question: "Is not the negro idle,
thriftless and thievish?" From time immemorial it has been asserted that
the laws of meum and tuum have no meaning for the colored man. It is a
joke current in more than one American city, that the police have
standing orders to arrest every negro seen carrying a turkey or a
chicken along the street. In other words, the funny man would have us
believe that the innate love of poultry in the Ethiopian's breast is so
great that the chances are against his having been possessed of
sufficient force of character to pass a store or market where any birds
were exposed for sale and not watched.
It is doubtless a libel on the colored race to state that even the
majority of its members are chicken thieves by descent rather than
inclination, just as it is a libel on their religion to insinuate that a
colored camp meeting is almost certain to involve severe inroads into
the chicken coops and roosts of the neighboring farmers. Certain it is,
however, that chicken stealing is one of the most dangerous causes of
backsliding on the part of colored converts and enthusiastic singers of
hymns in negro churches. The case of the convert who was asked by his
pastor, a week after his admission to the church, if he had stolen a
chicken since his conversion, and who carefully concealed a stolen duck
under his coat while he assured the good man that he had not, is an
exaggerated one of course, but it is quoted as a good story in almost
every State and city in the Union.
Mr. Sala objects very much to judging a whole class of people by a few
street-corner or cross-road loungers. The negro he found to be
superstitious, just as we find them to-day. Even educated negroes are
apt to give credence to many stories which, on the face of them, appear
ridiculous. The words "Hoodoo" and "Mascot" have a meaning among these
people of which we have only a dim conception, and when sickness enters
a family the aid of an alleged doctor, who is often a charlatan of the
worst character, is apt to be sought. It will take several generations
to work out this characteristic, and perhaps the greatest complaint the
colored race has against those who formerly held them in subjection, is
the way in which voodoo and supernatural stories were told ignorant
slaves with a view to frightening them into obedience, and inciting them
to extra exertions.
For absolute ignorance and apparent lack of human understanding, the
negro loafer to be found around some of our Southern towns and depots
may be quoted as a signal and quite amusing example. The hat, as Mr.
Sala humorously puts it, resembles an inverted coal scuttle or bucket
without handles, and pierced by many holes. It is something like the
bonnet of a Brobdingnagian Quakeress, huge and flapped and battered, and
fearful to look upon.
"Hang all this equipment," this interesting writer goes on to say, "on
the limbs of a tall negro of any age between sixteen and sixty, and then
let him stand close to the scaffold-like platform of the depot shanty
and let him loaf. His attitude is one of complete and apathetic
immobility. He does not grin. He may be chewing, but he does not smoke.
He does not beg; at least in so far as I observed him he stood in no
posture and assumed no gestures belonging to the mendicant. He looms at
you with a dull, stony, preoccupied gaze, as though his thoughts were a
thousand miles away in the unknown land; while once in every quarter of
an hour or so he woke up to a momentary consciousness that he was a
thing neither rich nor rare, and so wondered how in thunder he got
there. He is a derelict, a fragment of flotsam and jetsam cast upon the
not too hospitable shore of civilization after the great storm had
lashed the Southern sea to frenzy and the ship of slavery had gone to
pieces forever. Possibly he is a good deal more human than he looks, and
if he chose to bestir himself and to address himself to articulate
discourse, could tell you a great many things about his wants and
wishes, his views and feelings on things in general which, to you, might
prove little more than amazing. As things go, he prefers to do nothing
and to proffer no kind of explanation as to why he is standing there in
a metaphorical mill pond very much 'longer than he oughter.'"
One turns with pleasure from the severe, but perhaps not overdrawn,
character sketch of the colored loafer, to the better side of the modern
negro. The intense desire for education, and the keen recognition of the
fact that knowledge is power, point to a time when utter ignorance even
among the negroes will be a thing of the past. Prejudice is hard to
fight against, and the colored man has often a considerable amount of
handicap to overcome. But just as Mr. Sala found the typical negro,
"standing in the mill pond longer than he oughter," a sad memento of the
past, so the traveler can find many an intelligent and entertaining
individual whose accent betrays his color even in the darkest night, but
whose cute expressions and pleasant reminiscences go a long way towards
convincing even the sternest critic that the future is full of hope for
a race whose past has in it so little that is either pleasing or
satisfactory.