EDUCATION OF NEGROES.
The _fact_ that the negro is a negro, carries with it the inference or
the necessity that his education—the cultivation of his faculties, or
the development of his intelligence—must be in harmony with itself, and
therefore must be an entirely different thing from the education of the
Caucasian. The term education, in regard to our own race, has widely
different significations. It may be the mere development of the mind, or
it may mean, with the cultivation of the intellect, the formation of the
character, as Pope says:
“’Tis education forms the common mind;
Just as the twig is bent, the tree’s inclined.”
But without restricting the term to the former limit—the development of
the intelligence—it will be found that the education of the negro at the
South is in entire harmony with his wants, the character of his mind,
the necessities of his mental organism; and that they are the best
educated negro population ever known in human experience.
Common sense and experience teach us to educate all creatures committed
to our charge in accordance with their wants. No one would presume to
teach a horse as he would a dog, or any other animal. We have our
schools for girls as well as for boys, and the education varies
continually as the child changes into youth, adolescence, and finally
into manhood. The nature and condition of the pupil are the great
central facts—whether a horse or a dog, a boy or a girl, a youth or a
man, a negro or a Caucasian; the education must, if natural and proper,
always hinge on this central fact. The negro brain and mental character,
as has been shown, differs from our own both in degree and in quality,
in the extent of its powers, and the form or modes of mental action. As
still more strikingly manifest among animals, the negro child has more
intelligence than the white of the same age. This is in harmony with the
great fundamental law which renders the most perfectly organized beings
most dependent on reason—in the parents, if not that of the offspring.
The calf or pig of a month has more intelligence than the child of that
age; the negro child has more than that of the Caucasian, but the
character of this intelligence, of course, varies in each and every
case. In the lower animals it is instinct; in the case of the negro
child it is more than instinct, but it is also radically different from
that nascent rationality peculiar to the white child. Nevertheless, it
is intelligence, and, as observed, more active in the negro child than
in that of the white of the same age—an intelligence which enables it to
preserve life where the former would, perhaps, perish, and thus to
preserve the race amid the exigencies of savagism and the absence of
care and forethought in the parents. It is this smartness of the negro
child that has often deceived and deluded those perverse and deluded
people of our own race, who get up negro schools. They see, or rather
think they see, in this smartness the proof of their theories in regard
to negroes, and parade their pets to admiring visitors with the utmost
confidence in the justice and humanity of their exertions in behalf of
an “oppressed and down-trodden race.” But a few years more of these
negro pupils would be sufficient (if any thing could be) to open the
eyes of these perverted people, who, shutting their eyes and closing
their ears to the ignorance and miseries of their own race, waste their
money and time on a different one; indeed worse than waste, for they
inflict much evil on the mistaken objects of their labors, evils though
perhaps not traceable, that must necessarily attend every one of these
negro pupils thus forced into a development opposed to the laws of their
organism, and in contradiction to the negro nature.
The cultivation and development of the mental faculties, the mode or
modes of education, are instinctive with our race, though constantly
improved and perfected by reason resting on experience. The Greeks,
Egyptians, and other ancient nations practiced substantially the system
now common to modern times—that is, they taught their children by
abstract lessons as well as oral instruction. They studied arithmetic,
or the science of numbers, grammar, history, etc., under the direction
of parents or guardians, as well as listened to lectures on rhetoric and
philosophy in the “groves of the academy.” History and biography were
the legends and traditions of gods and goddesses, it is true, but modern
history is mainly that of kings and queens, and as the former were once
human, the only substantial difference consists in the greater accuracy
of the latter.
The Mongol mind has its specific tendencies in this respect; that is,
children are taught, not by abstract lessons, but by material emblems
which represent _their_ ideas. They have no history, in our sense of the
term. It is utterly impossible that the Mongol mind can trace back
events beyond a certain number of generations, and the crude and
contradictory mass of nonsense which passes for Chinese history or the
“Annals of China,” is the work of Caucasian Tartars or those of
predominating Caucasian innervation.
The negro has never taken one step towards mental development, as we
understand it. He has never invented an alphabet—that primal
starting-point in mental cultivation—he has never comprehended even the
simplest numerals—in short, has had no instruction and can give no
instruction except that which is verbal and imitated, which the child
copies from the parents, which is limited to the existing generation,
and therefore the present generation are in the same condition that
their progenitors occupied thousands of years ago. But the Almighty has
adapted him to a very different condition from this fixed and
non-progressive savagism. All the subordinate races have a certain
capacity for imitating the higher habitudes of the Caucasian, unless it
be the Mongol, which, perhaps, does not possess this faculty. The
English have been masters in Hindostan for more than a century—their
power rests on the same tenure of force on which it was founded—they
have made no impression whatever on the habitudes of the
Hindostanee—their language, their schools, their religion, their mental
habits, are untouched, and it may be doubted if God ever designed that
they should be in juxtaposition or made subject to a superior race.
In regard to the negro, there can be no doubt, not merely because, by
himself, he is a non-producing and non-advancing savage, but because his
entire structure, mental and physical, is adapted to juxtaposition. All
the other races have a certain specific character to overcome first, or
to be understood and properly harmonized, but the negro is a blank, a
wilderness, a barren waste, waiting for the husbandman or the Caucasian
teacher to develop his real worth, and gifted with his wonderful
imitative powers, he not only never resists, but reaching forth his
hands for guidance and protection, at once accepts his teacher, and
submits himself to his control. Of the four millions now in our midst, a
considerable proportion are the children of native Africans, indeed,
there are not a few natives still among us, and yet everything connected
with Africa—their traditions, language, religion, even their names have
wholly disappeared. The Normans conquered the Saxons eight centuries
ago, but the Saxon names, and even their language, are now as entirely
Saxon as if a Norman had never landed on the shores of England. This
blank, this feeble mental capacity and readiness of the negro nature to
imitate the habits, bodily or mental, of the superior race, adapts the
negro to his subordinate social position, and the purposes to which
Providence has assigned him. The child-like intellect does not resist
the strong and enduring mental energies of the Caucasian—its first
impressions pass away in a few years, while its imitative capacities sit
so gracefully on the negro nature that multitudes of ignorant people
confound the real with the borrowed, and actually suppose that the
“smart” negroes to be met with occasionally at the North are examples of
native capacity. Of course, the borrowed intelligence is equally
short-lived, and were our negroes carried back to Africa, they would
lose what they had acquired here with the same rapidity that they have
parted with their original Africanism, and names among them now
celebrated would be as utterly lost a hundred years hence as their
African names have disappeared here. These things being so, it obviously
follows that negro “education” must be oral and verbal, or, in other
words, that the negro should be placed in the best position possible for
the development of his imitative powers—to call into action that
peculiar capacity for copying the habits, mental and moral, of the
superior Caucasian. It may be said that all mental instruction is
through the imitative capacity, or that our own children are thus
educated, but the negro mind, in essential respects, is always that of a
child. The intelligence, as observed, is more rapidly developed in the
negro child—those faculties more immediately connected with sensation,
perception, and perhaps memory, are more energetic, but when they reach
twelve and fifteen they diverge, the reflective faculties in the white
are now called into action, the real Caucasian character now opens, the
mental forces are fairly evolved, while the negro remains stationary—a
perpetual child. The negro of forty or fifty has more experience or
knowledge, perhaps, as the white man of that age has a more extended
knowledge than the man of twenty-five, but the intellectual calibre—the
actual mental capacity in the former case is no greater than it was at
fifteen, when its utmost limits were reached—its entire power in full
development.
The universal experience which, in this as many other instances, usually
rests upon truth, leads the people of the South to designate the negro
of any age as a “boy”—an expression perfectly correct, in an
intellectual sense, as the negro reaches his mental maturity at twelve
or fifteen, and viewed from our stand-point, is, therefore, always a
boy. Indeed, this psychological fact, together with his imitative
instinct, constitutes the specific character of the race, and present
the landmarks necessary for our guidance when dealing with the mental
and moral wants of the negro. Intellectually considered, he is always a
boy—a perpetual child—needing the care and guidance of his master, and
his instinctive tendencies to imitate him, therefore, demand that, as in
the case of children, the master should present him a proper example.
His mental wants, it is believed, are provided for, and his capabilities
in these respects fully developed at the South. They are in pretty
extensive intercourse with the white people; even on the large
plantations they have the master’s family or that of the overseer to
copy after and to guide them, and though it may be that something more
is needed, that a better mental training is possible in the future, it
is, at all events, certain that this verbal instruction is better
adapted to their wants than the schools and colleges of a different and
vastly superior race. If any one should propose to teach children of
five the branches proper to those of ten and twelve years of age, or the
latter those that occupy young men in the universities, it would be seen
at a glance that this teaching was unnatural and improper. And our
every-day experience will show that it is injurious, not alone to the
mental, but to the bodily health of the pupil. The same or similar
results must attend the school education of negroes. It is, perhaps,
difficult to trace the consequences of negro education at the North.
There are but few negroes, and the mulattoes and mongrels who pass for
such must pay a penalty for this education according, doubtless, to
their proportion of negro blood.
The mongrels, and possibly some negroes at the North, often seem as well
educated as white men, but it must be at the expense of the body,
shortening the existence, just as we sometimes witness in the case of
children when the pride, vanity, or ignorance of parents have stimulated
their minds, and dwarfed or destroyed their bodies. An “educated” negro,
like a “free negro,” is a social monstrosity, even more unnatural and
repulsive than the latter.
It is creditable to the people of the South that no such outrage on
nature and common sense is found in all her borders. God has made the
negro an inferior being, not in most cases, but all cases, for there are
no accidents or exceptions in His works. There never could be such a
thing as a negro equaling the standard Caucasian in natural ability. The
same Almighty Creator has also made all white men equal—for idiots,
insane people, etc., are not exceptions, they are results of human
vices, crimes, or ignorance, immediate or remote. What a false and
vicious state of society, therefore, when human institutions violate
this eternal order, and by withholding education from their own
brethren, educate the inferior negro, and in a sense make him superior
to white men, by setting aside the law of God!
Some of the States have passed laws against teaching negroes to read; a
more extended and enlightened knowledge of the negro will, doubtless,
some day govern this matter through public opinion, and without
governmental interference. The negro learns from his master all he needs
to know, all that he can know, in a proper sense, all that is essential
to the performance of his duties, or necessary to his happiness and the
fulfilment of the purposes to which nature has adapted him; and though
there might, perhaps, be no good reason given why he should be
prohibited from learning to read, it is sufficient to say that it is
absurd, as well as a waste of time that should be carefully employed.
His mental powers are unable to grapple with science or philosophy, or
abstractions of any kind, and it would be folly to suppose that he would
be or could be interested in history or biography, in which his race,
his instincts, his wants have no share, record, or connection whatever.
All this applies, of course, to the South—to negroes in their normal
condition and natural relation to the superior race. It may be well
enough at the North, as long as they have mongrels and free negroes, to
provide schools for them, as they have no other guide or protector but
the State itself, but though they thus acquire a certain kind of mental
activity, as observed, it is at the expense of the vital forces, and
another of those incidental causes that tend to the final extinction of
this abnormal element. It is, however, a disgrace, and, to a certain
extent, a crime in any State to educate negroes or mongrels, so long as
they have one single uneducated white man within their limits. The proof
of this is seen every day in the _fact_ that however educated, or
whatever the seeming mental superiority of the “colored” man, the
uneducated white man tolerates no equality. Thus nature vindicates her
rights, and whatever the ignorance, delusion, or crimes of society, the
eternal order fixed by the hand of God is inevitable and everlasting.