Part 1

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A GLANCE AT THE PAST AND PRESENT OF THE NEGRO

AN ADDRESS BY

ROBERT H. TERRELL

DELIVERED AT CHURCH’S AUDITORIUM BEFORE THE CITIZEN’S INDUSTRIAL LEAGUE OF MEMPHIS, TENNESSEE, SEPTEMBER 22, 1903

WASHINGTON Press of R. L. Pendleton, 524 10th St. N. W. 1903.

A GLANCE AT THE PAST AND PRESENT OF THE NEGRO.

By ROBERT H. TERRELL.

MR. PRESIDENT, LADIES AND GENTLEMEN:

Two events in the history of our country take a foremost place among the great deeds of the world. The signing of the Declaration of Independence is one, and the promulgation of the Emancipation Proclamation is the other. In political importance both are unrivaled, and in moral grandeur both unsurpassed. The courage and patriotism of the men who wrote their names on the immortal document that brought on the Revolutionary War will always occupy as bright a page in the annals of our country as the prowess and fierce determination of the heroes who fought its battles on the field. When Abraham Lincoln, of blessed memory, signed the sacred document that gave to the Negro his freedom, he not only immortalized himself, but performed a deed that will live in history as long as the great military engagements of the Civil War. When with the stroke of his pen he broke the chains of four millions of human beings, he crowned his career with a halo of glory that will grow brighter and brighter to the end of time.

The signing of the Declaration of Independence brought on the war which culminated in victory for an oppressed people and in the establishment of our republican form of government. When the Colonial soldier returned to his fireside and laid down his implements of battle he found awaiting him a political system so moulded and vitalized that it secured to him his liberty and those rights which tend to dignify man. The ultimate results of the Revolutionary War were all that the patriots of 1776 had fought for, all that they had hoped for. They are today a blessed inheritance to their descendants. The American Republic is now in the front ranks of great nations, and her white population the first in freedom of all people on earth.

The Emancipation Proclamation was a document far greater in its moral purpose than the Declaration of Independence, for there was in it more humanity and more Christianity. The Colonial fathers declared that all men are created equal—a beautifully wrought truth which meant everything for one part of the population but nothing for another part which was held in a cruel slavery. The historic paper which Lincoln gave to the world nearly a hundred years later abolished that slavery. It has not, however, fulfilled the wishes, the hopes, and the final expectations of those who pleaded so eloquently for the Negro on the rostrum, or those who fought so desperately on the field of battle to make its provisions effective. And our cup is all the more bitter, when the thought comes to us that among those who bled and died that the country might be saved and their kinsmen free were black men, the bravest soldiers that ever wore a uniform.

The denial of rights guaranteed the Negro by the Constitution and the refusal to grant him the ordinary privileges of a freeman have created what is called the “Negro Problem”—the most prominent, the gravest and the most important question in American affairs. Ten millions of people with African blood in their veins—“an undifferentiated part of the Nation”—are made the objects of the meanest discrimination and the most unjust treatment by a so-called superior race seven times their number. I can see for the American people no permanent peace, no ease of conscience until the Negro question is settled, and settled right.

At no time since the Civil War has the future of the Negro seemed so dark and so uncertain as today. We are in thick weather and on a stormy sea, and many wise and thoughtful people fear for our safety. But I believe behind the clouds the sun is shining and is bound to bring in God’s final day of light. The older ones among us have seen darker days than these. They have seen husbands sold from wives and children from mothers, yet they hoped on and prayed on until the day of their redemption came. And shall we with forty years of freedom behind us and forty years of opportunity to strengthen and develop us be less courageous than they were? It may be well for us to pause a moment and take a cursory glance at the history of the black man in America and see through what trials and through what difficulties he has so triumphantly come. Such a review may be helpful to us and may make our present seem less gloomy and more hopeful.

In the year [1]1620 two ships from foreign shores set sail for America. Both carried passengers destined to play an important part in the history of our country. One came from England and landed her precious burden on the northern shore of Cape Cod. The other sailed from the sunny shores of Africa, touched at Jamestown in Virginia, and left there twenty black men as slaves. Those from England were the forerunners of a people distinguished for thrift, enterprise and ingenuity. To these pilgrims and their descendants the American nation is very largely indebted for its greatness. But that score of black men, unwilling emigrants, torn by force from their native land, were the fathers of a people who produced no such salutary effect upon the civilization with which they came in contact. They proved to be a hindrance to it rather than an advantage. They and their descendants were slaves. The labor which they performed lost its dignity and became degrading in the eyes of the white man in the section where these bondmen lived and toiled. The development of this spirit has been the great misfortune—the bane of the southern states, for nothing is more essential to the prosperity of a community than industry in all its citizens.

Footnote 1:

Many writers say that slavery was introduced in the Colonies in 1619.

The germ of slavery that fell upon the soil of Virginia in 1620 took root and grew with marvellous rapidity until it became an evil more destructive than a pestilence. No event in the history of our country has carried with it to its last analysis such terrible consequences. Nor did slavery confine itself to the colony of Virginia, but it spread in all directions and even reared its head among the sons of the Pilgrims and stalked shamelessly over the hills of New England. Two hundred years before proud, aristocratic, Cavalier Virginia had won for herself the distinguished honor of being called “The Mother of Presidents,” she became the Mother of Slavery.

The northern white man and the southern white man alike became responsible for the pernicious system of serfdom introduced in America. Frederick Douglass said there was but one innocent party to the evil and that was the Negro himself. And as he was the innocent party to his slavery, so he has been since his emancipation the innocent and abused party in all controversies relating to his privileges as a freeman and to his rights as a citizen.

There have been stirring issues and far-reaching upheavals crowded into the eventful years, and things have moved fast in this country since its first settlement. A great war came and changed the legal relations of its inhabitants and conferred upon them new rights, discharged old bonds and imposed new duties. A people achieved independence and brought into existence a nation. Questions of great import came to the surface; questions of national policy demanding solution, questions that were disposed of in a wise and statesman-like and patriotic way. But there was one question, the like of which had never before harassed a nation. It was how to maintain a democratic form of government of thirty millions of people, of whom twenty millions existed under one kind of social and industrial system and ten millions under another totally different from it. The twenty millions of one race forming one section of the country, carried out to some extent among themselves that portion of the Declaration of Independence touching the equal creation and inalienable rights of man. The ten millions forming the other section consisted in nearly equal portions of two races—one Anglo-Saxon, the other African; one master, the other slave; one the descendants of voluntary emigrants who came hither seeking happiness and a broader freedom; the other deriving their blood from forced emigrants who came to the shores of America and were sold as chattels.

This condition developed the problem which has harassed the country for more than a hundred years. It raised the question which could be answered only in one way, and that was that such an experiment in government with two such conflicting elements could not succeed. Abraham Lincoln answered it, when he said: “Our country cannot exist half slave and half free.” The thoughtful men of the nation saw the cloud on the horizon, when it was no bigger than a man’s hand. They endeavored to ward off the storm of which it was the precursor, but they were not equal to the task. It grew and grew and became darker and darker, until it finally burst into a tempest, destructive of life and treasure beyond the imagination of man. But this storm was worth all the sacrifice which our country was called upon to suffer, for it carried before it slavery and all its horrors. That glorious storm of shot and shell was sent by the Almighty as a punishment for our country’s greatest crime. It made it possible for us to assemble here tonight as a free people.

Those who associate the movement for the freedom of the Negro only with the northern section of our country forget that in Tennessee the first anti-slavery paper was published, and that in the early years of the nineteenth century it was far safer to deliver a speech against slavery in East Tennessee than in any part of the North. In Thomas Jefferson, Patrick Henry, George Mason and George Wythe, all Virginians, the cause of freedom found uncompromising advocates. It was through the influence of these men that the first Congress of the colonies in 1774 adopted unanimously a covenant against slavery. Thomas Jefferson wrote that portion of the ordinance before the Continental Congress in 1784 which declared for the freedom of the Negro in all territory to be ceded to the new Union by the original states. Unfortunately this section of the resolution was lost, because a delegate from the state of New Jersey, who was in favor of it, was not in his place in Congress when the vote was taken.

Those of us who have studied the passing and conflicting scenes and the bitter partisan struggles in our country for the last century, all growing out of slavery and the awful impress which the system left upon our civilization, can realize what tremendous results may hang upon the vote of a single individual. History relates that as the British ships at Trafalgar started into battle Lord Nelson, the great commander, signaled from the flag-ship this immortal message—“England expects every man to his duty.” It may have been the inspiration of these words that brought victory to the British forces that day. If this one delegate had been present when that all important vote was taken on what is now known as the ordinance of 1784, this country would have been spared the bloody drama of the Civil War and the Negro race a half century of a cruel, degrading slavery.

A wonderful lesson there is for us all in the failure of this one man to do his duty. In this hour, I may say, of our peril, when the whole Christian world has its eyes upon him, when all of his faults are magnified and all his virtues depreciated, it becomes necessary for the humblest one among us to do his duty; to live a life that will be above suspicion and that will command the respect of all men.

Though the Continental Congress did pass a law in 1787 prohibiting slavery in the territory of the United States northwest of the Ohio River, the friends of the Negro were not satisfied. They turned to the Constitutional Convention. Here was an august assembly of freemen, composed of the most illustrious statesmen, warriors and patriots of the new nation, presided over by the chieftain who had led its military force to victory. Surely, it was thought the black man would get justice from men who had just won their freedom from the usurpation of the British crown. He deserved to receive it. For, from the opening to the closing of the Revolutionary War, on many fields of strife and triumph, Negroes had fought the battles of the American Nation with a valor no less distinguished than that of their white brothers with whom they passed through that desperate struggle shoulder to shoulder. This is the cold fact of history.

The ill-luck that was with the Negro in the Congress of 1784, when his future was determined by the neglect of one man, followed him to the Constitutional Convention. Unfortunately, two powerful influences for freedom, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, were not present. They were abroad representing their country at European Courts. The great commoner George Mason of Virginia pleaded for the slave, but in vain. And when slavery tacitly went into the Constitution, like a man and a freeman worthy of the name, he refused to sign it, and walked out of the Convention. He prophesied then that God would finally punish a national sin like slavery by a national calamity. And so He did. The Negro had been a brave soldier in the hour of his country’s peril; the Constitutional Convention virtually declared that he was only a chattel in time of his Country’s peace.

In the shadows of the expiring days of the eighteenth century an influence for the perpetuation of slavery came from a source least expected. Among other inventions of the period was the cotton gin. It rooted the institution into the very marrow of the political and industrial life of the young Republic. The north began to develop cotton manufactories. It grew lukewarm on the subject of the freedom of the Negro. In the south the slaves increased in value, and slavery took on a new life. From this time on it became darker in its shades of inhumanity and moral degradation. It finally reached a point in its cruelty not far removed from the horrors and terrors of the “Middle Passage.” It approached, indeed, that monstrous maxim which is said to have come from the nation’s Supreme Court—“A Negro has no rights which a white man is bound to respect.”

But the star of hope had not completely vanished. Massachusetts had declared back in 1780 that no man could stand upon her soil and look upon the towering monuments erected to the memory of her illustrious sons who fell in defense of liberty, and be a slave. Her example was followed by other states, until in 1830 the last northern state freed its slaves.

And now a new crusade against slavery began. Thomas Jefferson, George Mason, Patrick Henry and John Adams had passed away, but their mantles fell on worthy shoulders. There appeared upon the scene men whom God had raised up to create for the country a conscience that would eventually demand the overthrow of slavery. They appealed to the people and invoked their sovereignty as the greatest and most affective force in a democracy.

First came Benjamin Lundy, preaching with vigor and power a gradual emancipation. Contemporaneous with him was William Lloyd Garrison, the radical, demanding nothing less than the immediate and unconditional manumission of slaves. His heroic and undaunted spirit, his earnestness and his uncompromising attitude on the subject of slavery easily made him the leading force among abolitionists. Around and about him were gathered other men imbued with the same sublime and holy sentiments. There were the eloquent Phillips, John Brown, burning with zeal, the learned Sumner, the fearless Lovejoys, our own majestic Frederick Douglass with his tongue of flame, and others equally energetic and equally in earnest. God had given to these men the fires of genius. It took the cause of human liberty to arouse them from their slumbers. Great events make great men.

From 1850 to 1860 the country was all aflame with the slavery agitation. The institution itself was complete master in the halls of national legislation. It prostituted statesmen, and by the Dred Scott decision, the Supreme Court of the United States “clothed it with the ample garments of judicial respectability.” Three quarters of a century after the fathers of the country had met in Convention “for the purpose of forming a more perfect union,” the great evil slavery brought that union to the very verge of dissolution. The prophesy of Jefferson that slavery would be the rock on which the country would eventually split was fulfilled and the states were in the throes of a Civil War.

There are evils so vast and radical that nothing short of a bloody revolution can be found sufficient to extirpate them. So the eradication of the monstrous system that held four millions of human beings in bondage—a vast property estimated in value at from twelve to fifteen hundred million dollars—was accomplished only by a terrible, devastating war—the court of last resort. From it there was no appeal.

In the beginning of the struggle few believed that the liberation of the slaves would be the outcome. And if it had not been for the obstinate perversity of the South the two sections of the country might have reached an agreement perpetuating slavery in the states in which it then existed and simply forbidding its extension into new territory. The North was perfectly willing that there should be a rehabilitation of the country with southern laws and southern institutions reacknowledged in their old form. But God was in this contest as well as man. He willed it otherwise. The war became so desperate that President Lincoln was forced to issue the Emancipation Proclamation as an imperative measure of self-defense. He did what he had always desired to do, but what he had been kept from doing by northern public opinion—an opinion which the exigencies of the situation had now revolutionized.

This act was soon followed by the arming of colored men for duty as soldiers. No men ever sought more eagerly to fight for any cause than did the black men for the freedom which the Emancipation Proclamation promised. When the opportunity was given them to enlist, they joyfully accepted it, and as the loyal white men had cried two years before, so cried they,

“We are coming, Father Abraham, Six hundred thousand strong.”

On the brightest pages of the history of the Civil War are written the accounts of their splendid deeds of valor. Port Hudson, Milliken’s Bend, Olustee and Fort Wagner are names that will always be inseparably connected with their glorious achievements in battle. The records tell us that 178,975 colored soldiers took part in 213 battles and skirmishes, and that 36,847 of them lost their lives. Among the men honored by the Congress of the United States with medals for distinguished service in action during the Civil War are seventeen Negroes.

The courage and the spirit of these men are shown in an occurrence which took place immediately after the desperate charge at Fort Wagner, where the sainted Shaw fell at the head of his black regiment. One of the officers went about among the wounded after the battle speaking to them words of encouragement. He finally came upon a large group of men and asked them: “If out of it and at home, how many of you would enlist again?” Every man replied, even the wounded, that he would, and that he would fight until the last brother should break his chains. “For if all our people get their freedom, we can afford to die”.

The good and just Abraham Lincoln speaking of the part Negro soldiers bore in the war, paid them this tribute: “There are some Negroes living who can remember, and the children of some who are dead, who will not forget that some black men with steady eye and well poised bayonet helped mankind to save liberty in America.”

The condition that faced the country at the close of the Civil War was a sad and serious illustration of the proverb that it is easier to destroy than to create, easier to pull down than to build up. To weld again the states into an harmonious union was a great task, made more difficult by the injection of a problem that was new, grave and without precedent. No nation had ever before been called upon to meet such a situation. Here were four millions of Negroes, recently emancipated, to be in some way absorbed in the body politic. How this could be done to the advantage of the freedmen, their former owners and the country, became a question of national proportions. The situation, too, presented a political phase, complicated by race antagonism, which made the work of the restoration and the reconstruction of the southern states not only difficult, but extremely uncertain. “It was most emphatically untrodden ground, an unexplored sea; and there were neither land-marks nor chart.” It was inevitable that whatever was done would be experimental and tentative. And, as if to paralyze and destroy any effort that might be made to adjust conditions so that a permanent peace and prosperity and happiness might follow, fell assassination came and struck down the great emancipator—the man best prepared to guide the ship of state through such difficulties and dangers.

It is easy enough for the men of our time to criticise, to find fault with and to underrate the efforts of the statesmen of forty years ago who devised the plan for the reconstruction of the states which had been in rebellion. But when one considers the intrinsic difficulties of the situation, he cannot but be impressed with the patriotism, the justice and the earnestness of purpose of such men as Charles Sumner, Thaddeus Stevens and Oliver P. Morton. The splendid legislation which their giant intellects matured and their indefatigable efforts helped to enact is the best evidence of their power of perception, foresight and judgment. The whole country owes a debt of gratitude to the superb statesmanship of these men, but the Negro race is preeminently the beneficiary of their mighty thoughts and prodigious labors. For out of the conflicts of purposes and plans for rebuilding a shattered nation, there were evolved with their aid the three great war amendments, guaranteeing to the Negro freedom, citizenship and the elective franchise. To weave into the organic law these marks of manhood for the black man was a fit return of a grateful country for the support he had given it in time of its distress. He had protected the government with the bayonet, it was right he should be granted the privilege of serving it with the ballot.

The 13th amendment legally abolished slavery, and, strange as it may seem, this provision of the organic law, brought the word “slavery” into the constitution for the first time. The 14th amendment prescribed citizenship for the Negro, and the 15th amendment put into his hands the ballot as a weapon of defense against those who were cruelly persecuting him. For it is a part of the history of the period immediately following the Civil War that “Black codes” were enacted in some of the southern states, so awful in their effect that the poor freedmen were reduced to a condition not far removed from slavery itself.