Part 3

“Nell, William C.--Anti-slavery agitator and author of Boston. In 1840 was a leader in the agitation for public schools to be thrown open to Negro children.”

“Lane, Lunsford.--Born a slave at Raleigh, N. C. He is placed in Prof. Bassett’s “History of the Anti-Slavery Leaders of North Carolina” among the four prominent abolitionists of that State.”

“Purvis, Robert.--Anti-slavery agitator; chairman of the Philadelphia Vigilance Committee of the Underground Railroad, and member of the first Anti-slavery Convention in 1833.”

“Redmond, Charles Lenox.--Born at Salem, Massachusetts, 1810, died 1873. First Negro to take lecture platform as an anti-slavery speaker.”

“Russwurm, John Brown.--Born in Jamaica, 1799; died in Liberia, 1851. Editor of the first Negro newspaper published in the United States, the “Freedmen’s Journal,” published in New York City, 1827.”

“Tubman, Harriet.--Fugitive slave and one of the most famous of the underground railroad operators, died March 10, 1913.”

“Truth, Sojourner.--A noted anti-slavery speaker, born about 1775, in Africa. Brought when a child, to America, she was sold as a slave in the State of New York.”

“Still, William.--Secretary of the Philadelphia Vigilance Committee of the Underground Railroad. Born October 7, 1821, in Burlington County, New Jersey.”

“Walker, David.--First Negro to attack slavery through the press. Born free at Wilmington, North Carolina, 1785.”

“Gibbs, Miffin Wistar.--Lawyer and anti-slavery agitator; born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, April, 1823. He died in Little Rock, Ark., July 11, 1915.”

“Knights of Liberty.--In 1846 Moses Dickson and eleven other free Negroes organized at St. Louis, The Knights of Liberty for the purpose of overthrowing slavery. Ten years was to be spent working slowly and secretly making their preparations and extending the society.”

Reference: (Work’s Negro Year Book; pages 168-69-70-71, 1918-1919 edition)

To the Colored boys and girls who desire to learn more about such mysterious underground railroad trains, that with their nervy and plucky passengers holding on with all their might, were constantly diving into and running under rivers as well as climbing upon and rolling down mountain sides without ever being wrecked or seldom losing a passenger, the writer begs to offer the following suggestion:

Any evening when such boys and girls suddenly get a burning thirst to visit the “movies” and drink in the red-blooded and heroic screen capers of a Wm. S. Hart, a Pearl White or a Douglass Fairbanks; let those boys and girls go to the nearest library instead, secure a copy of William Still’s “Underground Railroad Records”, and return home with it. In its stories they will find just as hair-raising adventures and exciting escapes as are to be found in any of Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes detective cases; between its leaves they will find the same kind of serious wit and humor that smile up from a Walt Mason newspaper article; from cover to cover they will find the same kind of heart-rending and flesh-suffering word pictures that Longfellow and other authors have so vividly painted in telling of the expulsions and wanderings of the doomed Arcadians; but, last and most important of all they will find every one of its pages to contain as true and valuable American history as ever appeared in the writings of a Bancroft, a Fiske, a Higginson, a Prescott or a Ridpath.

IN THE CIVIL WAR

(1861-1865)

ABRAHAM LINCOLN

On American pages of history space, The world gives Lincoln the highest place, For the triple service his life did give So all men in freedom here could live.

When he signed his immortal name that day, It meant that together the States must stay; It lead the slaves to their freedom goals; It washed one sin from the Rebels’ souls. --_Harrison_

If Colored men and women in the previous wars could become such wonderful fighters and loyal Americans with no knowledge and little hope of ever receiving freedom from their unnumbered slave sufferings and sacrifices; then, how much braver and more patriotic would they be when fighting with a new hope and full knowledge that their future freedom depended upon the success of the side on which they were fighting? It is needless to say that out of the more than one hundred forty thousand Colored people who took active parts in the Civil War, there were countless numbers of gallant and self-sacrificing deeds performed by them that were only seen and noted by God. And those acts of valor and heroism that were witnessed and recorded here on earth by mankind are so numerous that space herein will not allow but the mention of a very few.

* * * * *

Captain Andre Cailloux was one of the bravest soldiers to fall in the Union charge on Fort Hudson. It is said that his Company charged that fort six times looking point-blank into the red-flaming, fire-spitting, bullet-biting and smoke-breathing mouths of the enemy’s cannons, with a heavy loss among his men in each charge. Feeling sure he was going to his certain death, yet never flynching, a Colored soldier, Anselmas Plancianocis, who was a color sergeant, uttered the following words to his commander before departing to his post of duty within gun range and full view to the enemy; “Colonel, I will bring back these colors in honor, or report to God the reason why.” He never brought back the colors. At another time during the noted battle at Fort Wagner, it was William Carney who upon seeing the colors about to trail on the ground as they slipped from the relaxing grasp of a dying comrade, quickly leaped to his side grabbed the flag staff and planted it on the breastworks. When he in turn was severely wounded and carried to the rear, he had just strength and breath enough to whisper, “Boys, the Old flag never touched the ground.” Both artists and poets have often come forth to paint and sing of the fierce fighting and brave stand made by that famous 54th Massachusetts Colored Regiment and its fearless and beloved white commander, Col. Robert Gould Shaw. He fell in the thickest of the battle surrounded by hundreds of his wounded and dying Colored troops whom he had watched over as a loving father and always led as a fighting officer. Although Col. Shaw and his men were greatly outnumbered by the enemy who repulsed their attack at Fort Wagner, the Colored soldiers, who had marched continually a day and a night without stopping and then pitched right into fighting without rest or food, proved to both the North and South that they were among the bravest of brave soldiers.

Civil War veterans now living, and when meeting each other usually become so excited when tongue fighting their battles over again that they forget for the time being all about their rheumatics and, throw away their canes as they hop about trying to imitate their former military actions in battles. Those who were there take delight in telling how Gen. Fitzhugh Lee and his prancing Old Dominion well trained white soldiers met their “Waterloo” in Fort Powhatan at the hands of the belittled and untrained slave troops. It was at Fort Harrison in Virginia that the Southerners on seeing Negro troops charging on the fort, taunted them with, “Come on darkies, we want your muskets.” Eye witnesses say that the so-called “darkies” being so used to obeying orders really did take the guns to the fort, but several hours afterwards when the smoke had cleared away it was seen that those Rebels who had remained to accept the muskets had received the bayonet ends through their bodies instead of the trigger ends into their hands. Gen. B. F. Butler’s records show that his ten regiments of ex-slave soldiers brought victory and fame all along their fighting lines.

Aside from the chief motive to help free themselves, without doubt one of the main things that spurred the Negro men to fight so valiantly was their constant memory of Fort Pillow. At that fort were stationed 292 Northern white soldiers and 262 Colored troops, all under the command of Major L. F. Booth. On the twelfth of April 1864 that place was surrounded by a much larger Confederate force under Generals Chalmers and Forest and ordered to surrender. Upon the fort refusing to do so, the Rebels closed in with their usual battle cry, “No Quarter”. And then as they broke in the fort and overpowered the handful of Union men, there began a scene of unmentioned butchering and slaughtering of Northern white soldiers and Colored ex-slave men, women and children that far surpassed in horribleness the massacre of Custer and his faithful little band by the Sioux chief, Sitting Bull and his merciless Indian warriors. So after that whenever Colored men entered battles their answer to the Rebel’s “No Quarter” was a challenge “Remember Fort Pillow,” and times too numerous to mention did Negro soldiers fully avenge that awful massacre of their comrades on that April day in Fort Pillow.

By reading the battlefield records of Gen. Thomas at Miliken’s Bend; Gen. Morgan at Nashville; Gen. Blount at Henry Springs; Gen. Smith at Petersburg; Generals S. C. Armstrong, B. F. Butler and O. O. Howard at other vital places, as well as the fighting records made in Virginia at Wilson Wharf, Deep Bottom, Fair Oaks, Hatchers Run and Farmville; full proofs can be found regarding the Colored soldiers’ supreme brave fights made for a twofold purpose--the saving of the Union and the freedom of themselves.

In summing up this part of this very important topic, the writer can think of no better way of strengthening the truth of foregoing assertions relative to Negro battlefield valour and loyalty in the Civil War than by quoting the following: “When the battle test came these regiments justified the hopes entertained by their sanguine friends.” This just and high tribute was paid to Colored Civil War fighters by Comrade John McElroy, a white editor of Washington, D.C., in the editorial correspondence of his National Tribune published April 7, 1921. He had written about General Rufus Saxton of Massachusetts taking military command of St. Helena Island, S. C. and forming the thousands of idle Negro men into regiments during the early stages of the Civil War.

On the Sea

In the month of June, 1861, the Union schooner, “S. J. Waring” was captured by the Confederate privateer, “Jeff Davis”. All the crew of the schooner, with the exception of a Colored man, William Tillman and two white men, were taken from the ship and replaced by Rebel sailors. At an opportune moment Tillman killed the Rebel captain and mate, drove all the other Rebels at the point of a gun below deck and took full charge of the ship. After ploughing through a terrific storm, during which time the Rebel sailors were brought up and forced to help man the wave-tossed ship, the Colored sailor safely guided the recaptured “S. J. Waring” into the harbor of New York. For that nervy and patriotic act he received from the Federal Government prize money amounting to six thousand dollars.

It was through the cool-headedness, gamesness and shrewd planning of Robert Small, a man of color, that the Confederate gunboat, “The Planter” was stolen out of Charleston Harbor, running the gauntlet of the Rebel’s watchful forts and barking cannons and safely delivered into the hands of a Northern squadron. In payment for this naval strategy Robert Small was made captain of the gunboat he captured and during his service continued to show marked fearlessness as a fighting sailor and unusual executive ability as a commanding officer.

When the Civil War was finally ended by General Ulysses S. Grant of the Union Army compelling General Robert E. Lee of the Rebel Army to surrender at Appomattox Court House, Va., on April 9, 1865, the Colored soldiers and sailors laid aside their warfare weapons with proud and thankful feelings that they had been given such great chances to help fight for and secure their own freedom.

ON THE PLANTATIONS

BROAD-MINDEDNESS

From African jungles to American shores, Negroes were brought to do all the chores; Though bought and sold without due blame, They now forgive this country’s shame. --_Harrison_.

The slaves who went into the battles of the Civil War came up to all the standards of loyalty and bravery that had been set for them as fighting soldiers. But it was left to the millions of Colored men who staid on the plantations during the war to come up to and go far beyond the standards of moral self-control and human just treatment set by their owners. The Colored men who were in the war were really enjoying a temporary freedom while they were fighting for a permanent freedom. But it was quite different with the shackled men who staid on the plantations during the war. They were then slaves not only one way but in three ways. First, they were still slaves to their owners as they were yet under their control; secondly, they were slaves to themselves inasmuch as they were their own bosses and overseers to plant, cultivate and reap the crops in the absence of the white men; thirdly and most important of all, they were slaves to the trust and honor under which they had been left with the care and protection of the white women and children on the plantations. And no records in history have been found to show where those thousands of white wives, daughters, mothers and sisters made complaints to their returned husbands, sons, fathers and brothers about having forced upon them insulting and raping attentions from those millions of slave men under whose whole care those white women had been freely left and safely kept during the Civil War.

If those Colored men had wanted to copy the spiteful, revengeful and immoral actions of most of their white owners, they could easily have mistreated or destroyed all of those helpless white women and children in revenge for the two hundred and forty-four years of unspeakable crimes committed against their Colored womanhood by the Southern white slave owners and overseers. Or the slaves could have run away, joined the Union Army in a mass and left alone those destitute white women and children to starve on the untilled plantations. But those men of the Negro race, not then three hundred years from the underbrush of Africa, had under their dark skins too much inborn manhood and brotherhood qualities to stoop down to such beastily acts. They naturally grasped that grand and big opportunity to show to the Southern white people and the rest of the watchful world (that helplessly looked on in silence but with pitiful and admiring glances) that they had in their characters and dispositions and knew when and how to use them, the sterling principles of open-fairness, loyal friendliness, tender feelings, human considerations, moral self-control and Christlike mercy.

It is undeniably true that as early as 1860 there were in the United States over five hundred eighty-eight thousand Mulattoes. (Ref. Work’s Negro Year Book, page 432, 1918-1919 edition). Among that large number many thousands were beautiful and innocent girls who were either retained as their white owners’ immoral mistresses on Southern plantations or sold hither and thither from the Potomac River to the Gulf of Mexico to be forced into shameful and degraded lives a thousand-fold more friendless, unhappy and unprotected than Longfellow’s wandering Evangeline.

As the Civil War did not begin until 1861, it is readily seen that those one half million and more Mulattoes were not the results of slave men forcing immoral attentions upon the white women and girls left under their personal cares during the four years of the Civil War. But those half-Colored, half white people were the undeniable results of the brutal rapings of white plantation owners and overseers upon their helpless and unprotected black slave women for over two hundred years. So is it strange that fair and pure minded white people throughout the world, knowing and seeing all around them today the increased results of those first beastily actions by immoral members of their own race, listen without interest but with shame and impatience whenever, through sheer politeness, they are compelled to remain as audiences before certain classes of Southern men who for centuries (including today) have been talking through mouth and press about keeping their Southern white blood untainted and unstained? Colored boys and girls, therefore, should not become down-hearted and discouraged when they read in newspapers or hear from platforms such Southern white men writing or making such “Jekel-Hyde” talks; because close-observing, sound-reasoning and fair-judging white people in the South, in the North and throughout the world fully understand the whole situation and do not in the least take such Southern false utterances seriously. In fact they usually cannot keep from laughing at the funny side of the whole thing and say among themselves, “How absurd.”

No one but God knows the number of deceived Southern white married women who during slavery days secretly worried themselves sick, slowly pined away and silently died of broken hearts in their richly furnished colonial mansions, because of the ever haunting, taunting and stinging knowledge that their unfaithful, disloyal and immoral husbands as well as being the fathers of their white wives’ children were also the fathers of their slave mistresses’ Mulatto offsprings. So is it surprising that clean-living, clean-thinking and justice-loving white people always exchange knowing winks with their friends and hurriedly put handkerchiefs up to their mouths in order to hide disgusted features and weary yawns whenever they find themselves in places where they have to listen to certain classes of Southern white men who for centuries (including today) have been boasting from platform and press about their unsurpassed and unexcelled fidelity and chivalry to their Southern white womanhood? Instead of losing their ambitions and hopes when hearing and reading such blaspheming words against their race and progress, Colored boys and girls should take on new hope and redouble their efforts in striving to become even more devout Christians, higher learned students, better skilled industrial workers and fuller law-abiding citizens. In reference to the inferiority of their colors, Colored youths should remember that the prettiest thing in the world (the rainbow) is Colored, and yet, no one is able to resist the fascinations of its archful beauty or forget the consolations of its floodless promise, just because Nature with splashing rain drops and flashing sun rays oft ribbons the sky with rainbow hues.

No one but God knows the number of black slave women who moaned their heart strings loose and died of broken spirits either in their one-roomed log cabins or out in fence-cornered fields, because of the ever torturing knowledge that the virtues and womanhoods of themselves and the chaste maidenhoods of their immatured and innocent daughters had been repeatedly and forcibly taken or sold by their white owners and overseers. Yet, not one of those white rapists was lynched, tortured and burned at the stake by Negroes, not even at the close of the Civil War when there were thousands of ex-slave holders living in some Southern districts where the Colored people outnumbered the white people five to one. And surely, after gallantly fighting through the thickest and hottest battles of the war, it was not fear nor cowardice that held those Colored men from avenging the unprintable immoral wrongs forcibly done for over two hundred years to their unprotected and helpless Colored women. But, it was the living up to and the carrying out of a certain high civic principle of their African tribal laws that they had inherited and which prevented the ex-slaves from striking such a revengeful blow upon the Southern whites. For among savage tribes in Africa the universal punishment for raping was certain death; different tribes having different methods of dealing out that penalty. But that punishment was never dealt out by a mob. Those tribes so respected and obeyed the laws under which they lived and were governed that as savage as they appeared to be, they always had enough self-control over their tempers and passions to leave the captures, trials, convictions and executions of such offenders to be carried out by their chiefs and their assistants who had been put in their offices for such purposes. And since America had made laws and appointed officers who should have caught, tried, convicted and punished those Southern white men who raped enough black women to cause the birth of over a half million Mulattoes, the ex-slave men felt that even if those laws had not been enforced by people who had been selected to do so, it was not their rights to take the laws into their own hands by forming themselves into lynching mobs. They felt that just as raping of either black or white women is a most damnable crime; so is lynching either by black or white mobs a most hellish sin. In making comparisons between the ancient laws of Nippur and the modern laws of the United States, relative to slaves, the world-famed journalist, Arthur Brisbane, in the June 22, 1920 issue of the New York American, under the title, “Today”, wrote in part as follows:

“Five thousand years ago some laws were better than those of our day.

“For instance, in those ancient laws, if a slave woman had a child, the father being her owner, the mother and the child were set free. In magnificent America, in Lincoln’s day, thousands of slave children, with slave owners for fathers, were sold in the public markets.”

Now, not for one moment do intelligent and law-abiding Colored citizens uphold or make excuses for the brutish crimes committed by the degenerate members (and there are many) of their own race. For they fully realize that it means a faster and higher progress of all their people to have Colored criminals punished to the fullest extent of the law, after they have been given the same fair trials, convictions and sentences that are handed out to the thousands of white criminals who commit the same kind of crimes. And just as Colored degenerates are disgusting and shameful to up-right living white people, so are white degenerates disgusting and shameful to up-right living Colored people. Thus the broad-minded and law-abiding Colored and white citizens now mutually know that it is for the greater advancement of both races and a closer brotherhood combining of all Americans for them to see to it, as far as possible, that all criminals be rightly protected when arrested, given fair trials, safely guarded after sentenced and fully punished in a confinement where they cannot further morally lower themselves nor longer dilute the purity of human society.

And in thus far carrying out their Christian duties for the elevation of humanity, good Colored and white people are contented in knowing that for those criminals of both races who are shrewd enough to escape the detection and punishment of earthly laws, there is a Heavenly law that never fails to punish them at the proper time. And even while on their death beds those evil doers are twisting and turning in mental and bodily sufferings, they will not on account of their torturing pains be able to truthfully and peacefully chant such consoling lines that are found in Tennyson’s poem “Crossing The Bar”, nor will their names be written in that “Book of Gold” where it is said Abou Ben Adhem had his name inscribed above all of those who loved the Lord, because he (Abou Ben Adhem) loved all his fellowmen.

FOLK-LORE SONGS OF THE AMERICAN NEGRO

DIFFERENT EMOTIONS

Prayer